;-NRLF 


GIFT   OF 

Mr.Leupp 


€  hr  UtUri BiDr  ILitr raturr  &n tre 

SELECTED 
LITERARY  ESSAYS 

FROM 

JAMES  RUSSELL  LOWELL 

WITH  INTRODUCTION  BY 

WILL   DAVID   HOWE 
Professor  of  English  in  Indiana  University 

and 

NORMAN    FOERSTER 

Associate  Professor  of  English  in  the  University 

•f  North  Carolina 


BOSTON     NEW  YORK    CHICAGO 
HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT,   1914,   BT   HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN   COMFAKT 
ALL   RIGHTS    RESERVED 


R.  L.  S.   236 


|)rffl« 

CAMBKIDOR  .  MASSACHUSETTS 
U    .    S   .    A 


1  7 ) u 
CONTENTS 

INTRODUCTION 

I.  LOWELL'S  LIFE  AND  PERSONALITY.     .     .       v 
II.  LOWELL  AS  A  LITERARY  CRITIC    .     .     .      ix 

SELECTED  ESSAYS 

CHAUCER  (excerpt) I 

MILTON  (excerpt) 20 

DRYDEN 44 

POPE  (excerpt) 154 

WORDSWORTH  (excerpt) 201 

CARLYLE 228 

EMERSON  THE  LECTURER 276 

THOREAU 290 


500674 


INTRODUCTION 


I.    LOWELL  S    LIFE    AND    PERSONALITY 

"ONE  is  sometimes  asked  by  young  men  to  recom 
mend  to  them  a  course  of  reading.  My  advice  would 
always  be  to  confine  yourself  to  the  supreme  books  in 
whatever  literature ;  still  better,  to  choose  one  great 
author  and  grow  thoroughly  familiar  with  him.  For 
as  all  roads  lead  to  Rome,  so  they  all  likewise  lead 
hence;  and  you  will  find  that  in  order  to  understand 
perfectly  and  weigh  exactly  any  really  vital  piece  of 
literature,  you  will  be  gradually  and  pleasantly  per 
suaded  to  studies  and  explorations  of  which  you  little 
dreamed  when  you  began  and  will  find  yourselves  schol 
ars  before  you  are  aware." 

Thus  spoke  Lowell,  the  reader,  professor,  and  man 
of  letters.  This  was  his  advice  in  his  day  and  serves 
as  well  in  our  time,  when  there  are  so  many  books 
and  so  few  good  readers.  How  well  he  followed  his 
own  teaching  may  be  seen  by  watching  him  grow 
from  early  childhood  to  advanced  maturity.  His  life 
was  one  long  search  for  the  "supreme  books,"  one 
quest  for  a  deeper  familiarity  with  the  u  really  vital 
pieces  of  literature." 

James  Russell  Lowell  was  born  in  Cambridge  within 
the  shadow  of  Harvard  University  at  a  time  when 
America  was  breaking  the  soil  for  a  new  intellectual 
and  spiritual  life.  In  his  veins  flowed  the  blood  of  one 


vi  INTRODUCTION 

of  the  best  New  England  families,  mingled  with  the 
romantic  Celtic  strain  of  his  mother,  a  descendant  from 
the  Spence  family  which  liked  to  trace  its  ancestry 
back  to  the  old  hero,  Sir  Patrick  Spens.  From  the 
lips  of  his  mother,  Lowell  listened  with  delight  to  the 
reciting  and  singing  of  the  old  ballads.  In  his  father's 
library  he  was  surrounded  by  books  which  had  been 
gathered  through  many  years  by  a  family  that  read  the 
best  that  New  England  could  afford. 

He  completed  the  course  at  Harvard.  He  won  lit 
tle  distinction  as  a  scholar  in  the  classroom,  but  was 
developed  exceptionally  by  his  u  browsing  "  among  the 
volumes  of  the  library.  If  we  glance  at  the  list  of 
books  which  he  drew  from  the  library  in  his  college 
days,  we  observe  the  same  eagerness  which  character 
ized  the  enthusiastic  reader  of  later  years.  There  was 
in  him  something  of  the  curiosity  which  in  the  period 
of  the  European  Renaissance  inspired  men  to  discover 
the  books  of  the  classic  past  just  as  our  pioneer  fore 
fathers  gave  their  lives  to  the  discovery  of  new  lands 
and  new  riches.  Lowell  was  always  led  by  this  same 
romantic  curiosity  in  his  wandering  in  u  the  realms  of 
gold." 

Having  come  to  the  end  of  his  college  course, 
young  Lowell  tried  to  find  himself  in  the  professions 
of  law  and  medicine  and  in  business,  but  the  old  love 
of  books  ever  drew  him  on.  Happily  for  him  he  re 
solved  to  make  a  new  start  by  writing  verse.  At  this 
time  Maria  White  came  into  his  life,  an  unusual 
young  woman  of  strong  radical  mind  who  encouraged 
him  in  his  idealism.  Under  her  sympathetic  inspira 
tion  he  wrote  his  first  poetry  which  showed  a  serious- 


INTRODUCTION  vii 

ness  of  purpose  and  a  sincere  devotion  to  the  best 
ideals  of  his  country.  So  began  the  career  of  Lowell 
the  poet. 

In  1855  he  was  appointed  to  the  professorship  of 
Belles-Lettres  at  Harvard,  to  the  same  chair  which 
had  been  occupied  with  distinction  by  Ticknor  and 
Longfellow.  While  serving  the  University  he  was 
first  selected  to  be  Minister  to  Spain  and  later  ad 
vanced  to  the  Court  of  St.  James.  All  these  positions 
he  filled  with  marked  success.  During  this  span  of 
thirty  years  (1855  to  1885)  it  was  possible  for  him  to 
devote  himself  to  his  reading  and  to  inspire  young 
students  with  an  enthusiasm  for  great  books  and  to 
mingle  with  men  of  letters  who  read  widely  and  sym 
pathetically.  He  was  able  to  develop  and  cherish  a 
taste  and  appreciation  of  the  great  literatures  to  a  de 
gree  which  is  rare  among  men. 

In  every  way  in  which  Lowell  expressed  himself 
he  was  the  same  likable  man  of  fine  sense  and  of 
genuine  virility.  In  his  excellent  biography  of  Lowell, 
Mr.  Greenslet  writes :  "  Lowell  had  a  way  of  utter 
ing  a  good  thing  in  talk,  then  jotting  it  down  in  his 
notebook,  then  writing  it  to  a  correspondent,  and 
then  using  it,  a  little  filed  and  polished,  in  whatever 
he  happened  to  be  composing  at  the  time.  One  has 
in  consequence  a  marked  sense  of  parallelism  in 
thought  and  phrase  in  the  three  modes  of  his  prose  ex 
pression."  His  lectures  to  his  students  at  Harvard, 
his  letters  to  his  many  friends,  his  political  and  literary 
essays,  all  reflected  delightfully  the  same  human  in 
terest  which  made  him  a  likable  man.  Leslie  Stephen 
once  wrote  of  his  "  unmixed  kindliness  and  thorough 


viii  INTRODUCTION 

wholesomeness  of  nature."  The  better  we  know  him 
the  more  we  like  him.  His  common  sense,  whimsical 
humor,  genuine  interest  in  affairs  of  the  day,  his  un 
daunted  faith  in  men,  —  these  saved  him  from  mere 
bookishness.  He  was  too  human,  too  much  a  social 
being  to  be  a  recluse.  That  he  knew  the  world  at  its 
best  and  cherished  the  highest  ideals  for  his  country, 
our  people  learned  when  they  trusted  to  him  the  most 
delicate  diplomatic  questions  in  Madrid  and  in  London. 

The  volumes  bearing  the  titles  Among  my  Books,  My 
Study  Jfindows,  Literary  Essays,  contain  his  more  for 
mal  criticism  on  the  reading  which  ran  through  his 
life.  These  titles  are  characteristic  of  their  author. 
Lowell  read  good  books,  talked  about  good  books, 
wrote  to  his  friends  about  good  books,  inspired  his 
students  to  read  good  books,  and  has  left  us  the  best 
things  said  in  America  about  the  good  books  of  the 
world  literatures.  He  read  widely,  preferring  the  au 
thors  of  modern  literature  rather  than  those  of  classic 
times.  He  liked  to  read  authors  through  with  the  pur 
pose  of  discovering  the  unity  in  their  work.  Thus 
he  found  that  Carlyle  fell  short  of  being  a  very  great 
author  because  he  did  not  reveal  this  unity;  Dante 
was  one  of  the  greatest  writers  because  his  work  was 
a  perfect  reflection  of  the  man  himself.  So  he  was  al 
ways  reading  books  from  the  human  point  of  view. 

It  was  fortunate  for  America  in  the  middle  of  the  nine 
teenth  century  that  our  leading  university  was  repre 
sented  by  a  teacher  who  was  so  thoroughly  American 
in  all  his  political  and  literary  ideals,  who  set  for  him 
self  the  task  of  interesting  the  young  nation  in  the  great 
authors  of  literature,  and  not  by  one  who  exalted  the 


INTRODUCTION  ix 

ephemeral  literature  of  his  own  country  chiefly  because 
it  was  American.  Nor  was  he  interested  in  mere  tech 
nique  or  in  any  timely  or  bizarre  expression.  He  was 
content  to  point  to  the  great  lights  whose  shining  had 
not  grown  dim  with  the  centuries.  Dante,  Chaucer, 
Shakespeare,  Spenser,  Milton,  Dryden,  Pope,  Lessing, 
Rousseau,  Carlyle,  Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  Keats, 
and  Emerson, — these  were  the  writers  who  had  made 
literature,  and  literature  stood  to  him  as  the  u  great  ex 
ponent  of  all  that  was  permanent  in  the  human  spirit." 
No  one  could  go  far  astray  who  inspired  his  readers 
to  know  more  of  these  masters. 

In  the  passing  years  as  we  come  to  look  upon  Frank 
lin,  Emerson,  Whittier,  Lincoln,  Whitman,  Mark 
Twain,  and  others  as  representing  in  this  way  or  in  that 
way  the  spirit  of  America,  we  shall  not  soon  forget  the 
lasting  service  rendered  to  our  higher  life  by  the  ideal 
ism  of  our  most  distinguished  American  man  of  letters. 

II.    LOWELL    AS    A    LITERARY    CRITIC 

In  a  letter  to  Miss  Barrett,  Robert  Browning  re 
ferred,  with  just  amusement,  to  "the  very  air  of  a 
Columbus  "  that  Lowell  betrayed  in  his  earliest  criti 
cal  writing.  This  naivete,  though  it  diminished  as  Low 
ell's  faculties  ripened,  was  always  characteristic  of  his 
criticism,  and  is,  indeed,  one  of  its  main  charms.  To 
his  countrymen,  who  were  in  Lowell's  day  flushed  with 
the  surprise  and  excitement  of  their  share  of  the  Ro 
mantic  Movement,  Lowell  was  a  Columbus,  because 
the  literatures  of  the  Old  World,  which  he  more  than 
any  other  brought  within  their  ken,  were  to  them  vir- 


x  INTRODUCTION 

tually  a  New  World  of  delight  and  inspiration.  He  was 
the  foremost  critic  and  humanist  of  our  New  England 
Renaissance;  he  wrote  for  those  who  had  little,  if  any, 
acquaintance  with  either  critical  traditions  or  the  poets 

-,  and  dramatists  who  to  him  were  the  brightest  of  the 
fixed  stars.  With  a  boundless  enthusiasm  for  the  finest 
things  in  literature,  and  with  hardly  a  rival  in  the  field  of 
interpretative  criticism,  he  made  an  extraordinary  im 
pression  upon  his  own  and  the  succeeding  generation. 

"  Historically,  his  criticism  is  of  the  first  importance. 

But  to  his  readers  in  the  twentieth  century,  Lowell's 
criticism  depends,  for  its  interest  and  value,  on  its  ab 
solute  excellences;  we  shall  find  it  preferable  to  study, 
not  so  much  its  historic  significance  as  its  merits  and 
demerits  as  literary  criticism. 

What  strikes  us  from  beginning  to  end  in  the  read 
ing  of  Lowell's  writing  on  literature  is  the  fact  that  it 
is  primarily  the  criticism,  not  of  a  literary  critic,  but 
of  an  insatiable  and  excellent  reader.  He  read  inces 
santly;  his  library  at  Elmwood  was  a  place  consecrated 
to  communion  with  the  highest  minds  of  literature. 
He  knew  the  classics,  and  read  fluently  French,  Ger 
man,  Spanish,  and  Italian.  Dante,  Cervantes,  Calde- 
ron,  Chaucer,  and  Shakespeare  he  studied  untiringly. 
He  could  read  for  incredible  stretches  of  hours,  and  he 
carried  the  literary  point  of  view  with  him  wherever 
he  went.  He  responded  immediately  and  abundantly 
to  excellence  wherever  he  found  it ;  with  an  unerring 
instinct  he  could  find  the  delectable  spots  in  the  uneven 
fields  of  Dryden  and  the  correct  gardens  of  Pope,  and 
like  Lamb,  he  could  relish  a  book  that  the  uncharit 
able  world  pronounced  stupid.  Though  he  wrote, 


INTRODUCTION  xi 

"  Books  are  good  dry  forage ;  we  can  keep  alive  on 
them  ;  but,  after  all,  men  are  the  only  fresh  pasture" ; 
and  though  in  practice  he  was  never  the  mere  book 
worm,  he  unquestionably  suffered  from  what  De  Quin- 
cey  called  "the  gluttony  of  books."  In  "A  Moose- 
head  Journal," he  remarked, "how  tyrannical  the  habit 
of  reading  is,  and  what  shifts  we  make  to  escape  think 
ing."  There  is  an  instructive  relation  between  his 
manner  of  writing  a  critical  essay  and  the  result.  He 
annotated  as  he  read,  for  lecture-room  purposes ;  it  was 
his  habit,  he  tells  us  more  than  once,  to  review  all  that 
a  man  wrote  just  before  criticizing  his  work,  and  while 
re-reading,  he  doubtless  annotated  more  amply;  then 
he  gathered  and  elaborated  his  material,  and  presto !  an 
essay  was  ready  for  the  public.  The  processes  of  re 
flection,  of  arrangement  of  material,  and  of  develop 
ment  of  ideas  had  but  scant  attraction  for  him ;  in  one 
of  his  commonplace  books  is  this  characteristic  entry : 
"  'T  is  only  while  we  are  forming  our  opinions  that  we 
are  very  anxious  to  propagate  them."  As  a  consequence, 
his  essays  are  sometimes  perfunctory,  and,  but  for  his 
irrepressible  cleverness  and  his  intermittent  response 
to  the  demands  of  the  subject,  some  of  them  would 
have  been  dull.  He  was  first  of  all  a  reader,  an  enjoyer 
of  books:  he  was  almost  —  to  use  an  epithet  that  he 
bestowed  upon  Cotton  Mather — "book-suffocated." 
His  mind,  though  alert,  was  not  by  nature  reflective. 
He  had  no  insistent  desire  to  search  for  standards  of 
criticism  or  life;  his  writing,  rich  in  many  ways,  is 
poor  in  ideas;  he  is  not  interested  in  points  of  view, 
in  hilltop  surveys,  but  rather  in  the  engaging  or  imagin 
atively  startling  detail. 


xii  INTRODUCTION 

Lowell's  criticism,  then,  is  quite  unphilosophic ;  is, 
indeed,  little  more  than  so  much  random  comment. 
Hut  what  comment!  how  diverting,  and  pungent,  and 
healthy,  and  true,  and  human,  and  (on  occasion)  sol 
emnizing!  If  he  wanted  the  poise,  the  symmetry,  and 
the  unity  of  purpose  characteristic  of  Arnold  (of  whom 
he  wrote,  "  clear  and  cold  as  a  critique  of  Matt  Ar 
nold's  "),  if  he  was  too  rarely  u  clear  and  cold  "  him 
self,  he  made  up  for  his  defects  in  a  fashion  by  writing 
with  a  warmth,  a  never-failing  gusto,  and  sometimes 
a  veneration,  that  are  communicated  to  the  reader  by 
the  contagion  of  a  large  nature.  His  view  of  the  art 
of  criticism  —  "  the  higher  wisdom  of  criticism  lies  in 
the  capacity  to  admire"  —  is  the  one-sided  romantic 
view  which  the  better  critics  of  our  own  day  have  wisely 
abjured;  but  whatever  we  may  think  of  the  view, 
Lowell  was  surely  a  noble  exemplar  of  it,  partly  be 
cause  his  admiration  was  almost  uniformly  deserved 
by  its  object,  and  partly  because  he  could  admire  greatly 
as  well  as  profusely. 

It  is  significant  that  Lowell's  best  critical  essays, 
such  as  the  "  Chaucer,"  or  "  Shakespeare  Once  More,'* 
or  the  extended  study  of  "  Dante,"  deal  with  the 
greatest  writers.  They  put  him  on  his  mettle,  evoked 
in  its  fulness  that  power  of  wise  admiration  and  sym 
pathy  which  needed  to  be  roused  if  he  was  to  do  his 
best  writing.  The  "  Dante  "  essay,  which  to  some  of 
its  readers  seems  disappointing  as  the  result  of  twenty 
years'  intimate  study,  is,  whatever  its  shortcomings, 
written  in  an  atmosphere  of  calm  spiritual  elevation 
which  many  more  original  and  speculative  critics  never 
breathe,  and  which  Lowell  himself  rarely  breathed 


INTRODUCTION  xiii 

\     \ 

unless  in  the  company  of  serene  spirits.  Here  is  a  typi 
cal  passage: — 

"  Dante's  ideal  of  life, the  enlightening  and  strength 
ening  of  that  native  instinct  of  the  soul  which  leads 
it  to  strive  backward  toward  its  divine  source,  may 
sublimate  the  senses  till  each  becomes  a  window  for 
the  light  of  truth  and  the  splendor  of  God  to  shine 
through.  In  him  as  in  Calderon  the  perpetual  presence 
of  imagination  not  only  glorifies  the  philosophy  of  life 
and  the  science  of  theology,  but  idealizes  both  in  symbols 
of  material  beauty.  Though  Dante's  conception  of 
the  highest  end  of  man  was  that  he  should  climb 
through  every  phase  of  human  experience  to  that  tran 
scendental  and  supersensual  region  where  the  true,  the 
good,  and  the  beautiful  blend  in  the  white  light  of  God, 
yet  the  prism  of  his  imagination  forever  resolved  the 
ray  into  color  again,  and  he  loved  to  show  it  also 
where,  entangled  and  obstructed  in  matter,  it  became 
beautiful  once  more  to  the  eye  of  sense." 

The  invariable  tokens  of  genius  which  Lowell  found 
in  Dante  and  Shakespeare  as  well  as  in  Homer  and 
^Eschylus  were,  first,  u  fatally-chosen  words,"  sec 
ondly,  u  the  simplicity  of  consummate  art,"  thirdly, 
an  u  harmonious  whole,"  and  fourthly,  a  u  happy 
mixture  and  proportion  "  of  the  qualities  of  artistic 
work  (imagination,  the  most  important,  supported  by 
its  "less  showy  and  more  substantial  allies").  Al 
though  he  nowhere  brings  together  these  various 
essentials  of  great  art,  and  although  the  first  two 
seemed  to  mean  more  to  him  than  the  second  two,  one 
is  doubtless  justified  in  saying  that  these  are  almost 
constantly  the  bases  for  his  critical  opinions.  When, 


xiv  INTRODUCTION 

for  example,  in  the  essay  on  Carlyle,  he  speaks  of 
Goethe  as  u  the  last  of  the  great  poets,"  the  charac 
teristics  of  genius  mentioned  above  are  implied  in  the 
epithet  he  italicizes. 

These  traits  of  the  highest  type  of  art  are  obvi 
ously  found  more  frequently  in  the  classical  literatures 
of  Greece  and  Rome  than  in  modern  literatures,  so 
that  one  might  expect  Lowell's  sympathies  to  lie  with 
the  former  rather  than  the  latter.  But  Lowell  had  not 
the  classical  spirit  —  he  preferred  painting  to  sculp 
ture,  the  mediaeval  cathedral  to  the  Greek  temple,  and 
in  general  Gothic  art  to  classic  art.  His  favorite  poets 
were  not  Homer,  Sophocles,  and  Virgil,  but,  no  doubt, 
Dante,  Shakespeare,  and  Calderon.  It  is  true  that  in 
his  address  on  "  The  Study  of  Modern  Languages  " 
the  undertone  is  one  of  instinctive  allegiance  — partly 
conventional  and  partly  personal  —  to  the  ancient 
literatures ;  but  in  this  address  he  seems  to  be  combat 
ing,  as  he  did  rather  often,  a  "secret  partiality."  His 
list  of  the  illustrious  writers  in  "the  literature  of  the 
last  three  centuries"  —  Dante,  Machiavelli,  Mon 
taigne,  Bacon,  Shakespeare,  Cervantes,  Pascal,  Cal 
deron,  Lessing,  and  Goethe  —  contains  more  names 
that  were  dear  to  him  than  would  any  list  of  ten  clas 
sical  writers.  In  the  Battle  of  the  Books  he  would 
probably  have  fought  lustily  for  the  cause  of  the  an 
cients,  yet  one  suspects  that  his  heart  would  have 
been  with  the  moderns. 

But  this  is  not  to  say  that  Lowell's  sympathies 
were  with  romanticism.  Petrarch  he  usually  credits 
with  being  the  inventor  of  u  romance  and  sentiment  — 
in  other  words,  the  pretense  of  feeling  what  we  do  not 


INTRODUCTION  xv 

feel,"  and  as  Petrarch's  followers  he  includes  Rous 
seau,  Chateaubriand,  Lamartine,  Byron,  —  in  fact, 
almost  all  who  come  after  Rousseau  in  point  of  time. 
It  is  true  that  Lowell  himself,  in  his  youth,  passed 
through  a  period  of  romantic  melancholy,  and  to  the  end, 
one  cannot  help  feeling,  nursed  in  secret  a  wild  spark 
of  romance  which  he  would  neither  fan  into  flame  nor 
forcibly  quench.  It  may  be  fanciful  to  suppose  that 
this  is  why  he  was  attracted  to  Dryden  and  wrote  so 
well  about  him — Dryden,  whose  poetical  enthusiasm 
was  chilled,  as  Lowell  pointed  out,  by  the  skeptical 
atmosphere  of  his  age.  At  all  events,  Lowell  was  but 
ill  at  ease  in  the  currents  of  thought  that  prevailed  in 
the  nineteenth  century.  Despite  his  Tory  nature,  he 
welcomed  the  spirit  and  doctrine  of  democracy  bravely ; 
but  evolutionary  science  ("  I  hate  it,"  he  wrote  in  a 
letter,  u  as  a  savage  does  writing  ")  and  the  introspec 
tion  of  romanticism  (the  "  melancholy  liver-complaint " 
of"  our  self-exploiting  nineteenth  century  ")  perplexed 
him  sorely,  and  caused  him  to  seek,  with  the  more 
earnestness,  the  hearty  good-fellowship  of  Chaucer  and 
the  serene  presence  of  Shakespeare. 

What  Lowell  lost  in  his  criticism  through  allowing 
it  to  be  random  comment,  he  well-nigh  made  up 
through  his  astonishing  power  of  expression.  What 
ever  entered  his  mind,  this  he  expressed  or  could  ex 
press.  His  literary  essays  and  his  classroom  talk  are 
of  a  piece,  so  that  what  Professor  Barrett  Wendell, 
one  of  his  pupils  in  the  famous  Dante  course,  says  of 
his  talk  applies  well  enough  to  his  essays :  "  Now  and 
again,  some  word  or  some  passage  would  suggest  to 
him  a  line  of  thought  —  sometimes  very  earnest,  some- 


xvi  INTRODUCTION 

times  paradoxically  comical  —  that  it  would  never 
have  suggested  to  any  one  else.  And  he  would  lean 
back  in  his  chair,  and  talk  away  across  country  till  he 
felt  like  stopping ;  or  he  would  thrust  his  hands  into 
the  pockets  of  his  rather  shabby  sack-coat,  and  pace 
the  end  of  the  room  with  his  heavy  laced  boots,  and 
look  at  nothing  in  particular,  and  discourse  of  things 
in  general."  Those  hours  in  the  course  on  Dante 
many  men  still  living  carry  about  with  them  as  an  im 
perishable  possession.  What  made  them  memorable  is 
mainly  Lowell's  character,  Lowell  the  man,  from 
whom  it  would  be  hard  to  separate  the  fertility  and 
readiness  and  aptness  of  his  power  of  expression.  His 
pages,  like  his  talk,  are  sprinkled  with  engaging  turns 
of  phrase,  quotable  epigrams,  figures  of  extraordinary 
u  patness,"  and  all  these  are  borne  on  a  swift  current 
of  speech  that  deepens  and  darkens  here  and  sparkles 
over  pebbles  there,  but  that  never  recognizes  impedi 
ment. 

To  watch  for  the  clever  phrases  and  passages  while 
one  is  carried  forward  rapidly  by  the  irresistible  tide 
of  his  style,  is  perhaps  not  the  most  elevating  pursuit 
conceivable,  but  it  has  an  excuse  in  the  excellent 
quality  of  Lowell's  cleverness.  There  are  two  kinds 
of  cleverness  :  the  first,  cheap  cleverness,  bears  the 
relation  to  the  second,  genuine  cleverness,  which 
melodrama  bears  to  tragedy.  Just  as  melodrama  offers 
thrills  for  their  own  sake,  while  the  thrills  of  tragedy 
are  inevitable,  so  cheap  cleverness  delights  in  produc 
ing  clever  effects,  while  genuine  cleverness  produces 
them  because  it  cannot  help  it.  Lowell's  cleverness  is 
of  the  latter  kind  ;  his  happy  expressions  give  one  the 


INTRODUCTION  xvii 

feeling  that  they  came  unsought,  that  they  arranged 
themselves  spontaneously.  Here  are  a  few  from  the 
first  volume  of  his  collected  prose  works  :  — 

"...  one  of  those  naked  pigs  that  seem  rushing 
out  of  market-doors  in  winter,  frozen  in  a  ghastly  at 
titude  of  gallop." 

[Of  the  dramatist  Webster :]  "  His  nature  had 
something  of  the  sleuth-hound  quality  in  it,  and  a  plot, 
to  keep  his  mind  eager  on  the  trail,  must  be  sprinkled 
with  fresh  blood  at  every  turn.  ...  He  has  not  the 
condensing  power  of  Shakespeare,  who  squeezed  mean 
ing  into  a  phrase  with  an  hydraulic  press,  but  he  could 
carve  a  cherry-stone  with  any  of  the  concetti sti.  .  .  " 

[Of  Emerson  :]  "His  eye  for  a  fine,  telling  phrase 
that  will  carry  true  is  like  that  of  a  backwoodsman 
for  a  rifle;  and  he  will  dredge  you  up  a  choice  word 
from  the  mud  of  Cotton  Mather  himself."  His  dic 
tion  u  is  like  homespun  cloth-of-gold."  Of  a  dis 
jointed  lecture  :  u  It  was  as  if,  after  vainly  trying  to  get 
his  paragraphs  into  sequence  and  order,  he  had  at  last 
tried  the  desperate  expedient  of  shuffling  them.  It  was 
chaos  come  again,  but  it  was  a  chaos  full  of  shooting- 
stars.  .  .  ." 

Such  things  as  those — and  one  could  find  still  bet 
ter  examples  in  the  other  volumes  —  would  repay  the 
reading  of  many  a  pedestrian  page,  if  there  were  any 
such  in  Lowell.  But  there  are  not.  First  of  all,  his 
writing  is  entertaining  —  one  can  read  him  in  the 
most  languid  hour ;  secondly,  it  is  inspiring.  If  the  en 
tertainment  is  ere  long  forgotten,  the  inspiration,  hav 
ing  recruited  our  spiritual  faculties,  abides  indefinitely. 

Since  Lowell's  death,  and  the  death   of  many  of 


xviii  INTRODUCTION 

those  who  came  under  the  spell  of  his  charming  and 
vigorous  personality,  his  reputation  as  a  literary  critic 
has  suffered  a  slight  decline.  The  decline  was  inevi 
table,  since  in  his  later  years  he  was  somewhat  over 
rated,  and  since  until  a  few  years  ago  no  one  had 
undertaken  to  expose  his  unquestionably  grave  defects 
as  a  literary  critic.  Now  that  his  defects  —  his  lack  of 
plan  and  of  purpose,  in  particular  —  are  clearly  under 
stood,  we  may  dwell  upon  his  excellences,  and  be 
grateful  for  them,  without  danger  of  exaggeration.  As 
rambling  essays  on  literature  rather  than  deliberate 
critical  estimates,  they  are  among  the  few  of  their 
kind  in  the  whole  range  of  English  literature  that  have 
survived,  and  they  may  confidently  be  expected  to 
outlive  the  more  orderly,  more  solid,  but  less  impres 
sive  works  of  critics  whom  only  critics  care  to  read. 
Generous,  brilliant,  and  wise,  his  conversations  on 
literature  will  ever  be  our  resort  when  our  own  un 
aided  light  seems  dim  and  unprofitable. 


LITERARY  ESSAYS 


CHAUCER 

1870 

c<  And  ay  the  more  he  was  in  despair 
The  more  he  coveted  and  thought  her  fair; 
His  blinde  lust  was  all  his  coveting. 
On  morrow  when  the  bird  began  to  sing 
Unto  the  siege  he  cometh  full  privily 
And  by  himself  he  walketh  soberly 
The  image  of  her  recording  alway  new: 
Thus  lay  her  hair,  and  thus  fresh  was  her  hue, 
Thus  sate,  thus  spake,  thus  span,  this  was  her  cheer, 
Thus  fair  she  was,  and  this  was  her  manere. 
All4this  conceit  his  heart  hath  new  ytake, 
And  as  the  sea,  with  tempest  all  toshake, 
That  after,  when  the  storm  is  all  ago, 
Yet  will  the  water  quap  a  day  or  two, 
Right  so,  though  that  her  forme  were  absent 
The  pleasance  of  her  forme  was  present." 

THIS    passage   leads   me  to  say  a  few 
words    of    Chaucer    as    a     descriptive 
poet;    for   I    think   it  a  great  mistake 
to   attribute    to    him     any    properly    dramatic 
power,    as    some    have    done.      Even     Herr 


2  CHAUCER 

Hertzberg,  in  his  remarkably  intelligent  essayt 
is  led  a  little  astray  on  this  point  by  his  enthu 
siasm.  Chaucer  is  a  great  narrative  poet ;  and, 
in  this  species  of  poetry,  though  the  author's 
personality  should  never  be  obtruded,  it  yet 
unconsciously  pervades  the  whole,  and  commu 
nicates  an  individual  quality,  —  a  kind  of  flavor 
of  its  own.  This  very  quality,  and  it  is  one  of 
the  highest  in  its  way  and  place,  would  be  fatal 
to  all  dramatic  force.  The  narrative  poet  is  oc 
cupied  with  his  characters  as  picture,  with  their 
grouping,  even  their  costume,  it  may  be,  and  he 
feels  for  and  with  them  instead  of  being  they 
for  the  moment,  as  the  dramatist  must  always 
be.  The  story-teller  must  possess  the  situation 
perfectly  in  all  its  details,  while  the  imagination 
of  the  dramatist  must  be  possessed  and  mastered 
by  it.  The  latter  puts  before  us  the  very  pas 
sion  or  emotion  itself  in  its  utmost  intensity ; 
the  former  gives  them,  not  in  their  primary 
form,  but  in  that  derivative  one  which  they 
have  acquired  by  passing  through  his  own  mind 
and  being  modified  by  his  reflection.  The  deep 
est  pathos  of  the  drama,  like  the  quiet  "  no 
more  but  so  ?  "  with  which  Shakespeare  tells  us 
that  Ophelia's  heart  is  bursting,  is  sudden  as  a 
stab,  while  in  narrative  it  is  more  or  less  suf 
fused  with  pity,  —  a  feeling  capable  of  prolonged 
sustention.  This  presence  of  the  author's  own 
sympathy  is  noticeable  in  all  Chaucer's  pathetic 


CHAUCER  3 

passages,  as,  for  instance,  in  the  lamentation  of 
Constance  over  her  child  in  the  "  Man  of  Law's 
Tale."  When  he  comes  to  the  sorrow  of  his 
story,  he  seems  to  croon  over  his  thoughts,  to 
soothe  them  and  dwell  upon  them  with  a  kind 
of  pleased  compassion,  as  a  child  treats  a  wounded 
bird  which  he  fears  to  grasp  too  tightly,  and  yet 
cannot  make  up  his  heart  wholly  to  let  go.  It 
is  true  also  of  his  humor  that  it  pervades  his 
comic  tales  like  sunshine,  and  never  dazzles  the 
attention  by  a  sudden  flash.  Sometimes  he 
brings  it  in  parenthetically,  and  insinuates  a 
sarcasm  so  slyly  as  almost  to  slip  by  without  our 
notice,  as  where  he  satirizes  provincialism  by  the 
cock  who 

"  By  nature  knew  ech  ascensioun 
Of  equinoxial  in  thilke  toun." 

Sometimes  he  turns  round  upon  himself  and 
smiles  at  a  trip  he  has  made  into  fine  writing :  — 

"Till  that  the  brighte  sun  had  lost  his  hue, 
For  th'  orisont  had  reft  the  sun  his  light 
(This  is  as  much  to  say  en  as  « it  was  night  ' ) . ' ' 

Nay,  sometimes  it  twinkles  roguishly  through 
his  very  tears,  as  in  the 

"  <  Why  wouldest  thou  be  dead,'  these  women  cry, 
'  Thou  haddest  gold  enough  —  and  Emily? '  "  — 

that  follows  so  close  upon  the  profoundly  ten 
der  despair  of  Arcite's  farewell :  — 


4  CHAUCER 

•'  What  is  this  world  ?    What  asken  men  to  have  ? 
Now  with  his  love  now  in  the  colde  grave 
Alone  withouten  any  company  !  " 

The  power  of  diffusion  without  being  diffuse 
would  seem  to  be  the  highest  merit  of  narration, 
giving  it  that  easy  flow  which  is  so  delightful. 
Chaucer's  descriptive  style  is  remarkable  for  its 
lowness  of  tone,  —  for  that  combination  of  en 
ergy  with  simplicity  which  is  among  the  rarest 
gifts  in  literature.  Perhaps  all  is  said  in  saying 
that  he  has  style  at  all,  for  that  consists  mainly 
in  the  absence  of  undue  emphasis  and  exaggera 
tion,  in  the  clear  uniform  pitch  which  penetrates 
our  interest  and  retains  it,  where  mere  loudness 
would  only  disturb  and  irritate. 

Not  that  Chaucer  cannot  be  intense,  too,  on 
occasion  ;  but  it  is  with  a  quiet  intensity  of  his 
own,  that  comes  in  as  it  were  by  accident. 

"  Upon  a  thicke  palfrey,  paper-white, 

With  saddle  red  embroidered  with  delight, 
Sits  Dido: 

And  she  is  fair  as  is  the  brighte  morrow 
That  healeth  sicke  folk  of  nightes  sorrow. 
Upon  a  courser  startling  as  the  fire, 
./Eneas  sits." 

Pandarus,  looking  at  Troilus,  — 

"Took  up  a  light  and  found  his  countenance 
As  for  to  look  upon  an  old  romance." 


CHAUCER  S 

With  Chaucer  it  is  always  the  thing  itself  and 
not  the  description  of  it  that  is  the  main  object. 
His  picturesque  bits  are  incidental  to  the  story, 
glimpsed  in  passing ;  they  never  stop  the  way. 
His  key  is  so  low  that  his  high  lights  are  never 
obtrusive.  His  imitators,  like  Leigh  Hunt,  and 
Keats  in  his  "  Endymion,"  missing  the  nice  gra 
dation  with  which  the  master  toned  everything 
down,  become  streaky.  Hogarth,  who  reminds 
one  of  him  in  the  variety  and  natural  action  of 
his  figures,  is  like  him  also  in  the  subdued  bril 
liancy  of  his  coloring.  When  Chaucer  condenses, 
it  is  because  his  conception  is  vivid.  He  does 
not  need  to  personify  Revenge,  for  personifica 
tion  is  but  the  subterfuge  of  unimaginative  and 
professional  poets ;  but  he  embodies  the  very 
passion  itself  in  a  verse  that  makes  us  glance 
over  our  shoulder  as  if  we  heard  a  stealthy  tread 
behind  us  :  — 

«'  The  smiler  with  the  knife  hid  under  the  cloak."  x 

And  yet  how  unlike  is  the  operation  of  the  im 
aginative  faculty  in  him  and  Shakespeare  !  When 
the  latter  describes,  his  epithets  imply  always 
an  impression  on  the  moral  sense  (so  to  speak) 
of  the  person  who  hears  or  sees.  The  sun  "  flat 
ters  the  mountain-tops  with  sovereign  eye " ; 
the  bending  "weeds  lacquey  the  dull  stream"; 

1  Compare  this  with  the  Mumbo-Jumbo  Revenge  in  Col-> 
lins's  Ode. 


6  CHAUCER 

the  shadow  of  the  falcon  "  coucheth  the  fowl 
below  "  ;  the  smoke  is  "  helpless  "  ;  when  Tar- 
quin  enters  the  chamber  of  Lucrece  "  the  thresh 
old  grates  the  door  to  have  him  heard."  His 
outward  sense  is  merely  a  window  through  which 
the  metaphysical  eye  looks  forth,  and  his  mind 
passes  over  at  once  from  the  simple  sensation 
to  the  complex  meaning  of  it, — feels  with  the 
object  instead  of  merely  feeling  it.  His  imagina 
tion  is  forever  dramatizing.  Chaucer  gives  only 
the  direct  impression  made  on  the  eye  or  ear. 
He  was  the  first  great  poet  who  really  loved 
outward  nature  as  the  source  of  conscious  plea 
surable  emotion.  The  Troubadour  hailed  the 
return  of  spring;  but  with  him  it  was  a  piece 
of  empty  ritualism.  Chaucer  took  a  true  delight 
in  the  new  green  of  the  leaves  and  the  return 
of  singing  birds,  —  a  delight  as  simple  as  that 
of  Robin  Hood  :  — 

"  In  summer  when  the  shaws  be  sheen, 

And  leaves  be  large  and  long, 
It  is  full  merry  in  fair  forest 

To  hear  the  small  birds'  song." 

He  has  never  so  much  as  heard  of  the  "  burthen 
and  the  mystery  of  all  this  unintelligible  world." 
His  flowers  and  trees  and  birds  have  never  both 
ered  themselves  with  Spinoza.  He  himself  sings 
more  like  a  bird  than  any  other  poet,  because 
it  never  occurred  to  him,  as  to  Goethe,  that  he 
ought  to  do  so.  He  pours  himself  out  in  sin- 


CHAUCER  7 

cere  joy  and  thankfulness.  When  we  compare 
Spenser's  imitations  of  him  with  the  original 
passages,  we  feel  that  the  delight  of  the  later 
poet  was  more  in  the  expression  than  in  the 
thing  itself.  Nature  with  him  is  only  good  to 
be  transfigured  by  art.  We  walk  among  Chau 
cer's  sights  and  sounds ;  we  listen  to  Spenser's 
musical  reproduction  of  them.  In  the  same  way, 
the  pleasure  which  Chaucer  takes  in  telling  his 
stories  has  in  itself  the  effect  of  consummate 
skill,  and  makes  us  follow  all  the  windings  of 
his  fancy  with  sympathetic  interest.  His  best 
tales  run  on  like  one  of  our  inland  rivers,  some 
times  hastening  a  little  and  turning  upon  them 
selves  in  eddies  that  dimple  without  retarding 
the  current;  sometimes  loitering  smoothly, 
while  here  and  there  a  quiet  thought,  a  tender 
feeling,  a  pleasant  image,  a  golden-hearted  verse, 
opens  quietly  as  a  water-lily,  to  float  on  the  sur 
face  without  breaking  it  into  ripple.  The  vulgar 
intellectual  palate  hankers  after  the  titillation  of 
foaming  phrase,  and  thinks  nothing  good  for 
much  that  does  not  go  off  with  a  pop  like  a 
champagne  cork.  The  mellow  suavity  of  more 
precious  vintages  seems  insipid  :  but  the  taste, 
in  proportion  as  it  refines,  learns  to  appreciate 
the  indefinable  flavor,  too  subtile  for  analysis. 
A  manner  has  prevailed  of  late  in  which  every 
other  word  seems  to  be  underscored  as  in  a 
school-girl's  letter.  The  poet  seems  intent  on 


8  CHAUCER 

showing  his  sinew,  as  if  the  power  of  the  slim 
Apollo  lay  in  the  girth  of  his  biceps.  Force  for 
the  mere  sake  of  force  ends  like  Milo,  caught 
and  held  mockingly  fast  by  the  recoil  of  the  log 
he  undertook  to  rive.  In  the  race  of  fame,  there 
are  a  score  capable  of  brilliant  spurts  for  one 
who  comes  in  winner  after  a  steady  pull  with 
wind  and  muscle  to  spare.  Chaucer  never  shows 
any  signs  of  effort,  and  it  is  a  main  proof  of  his 
excellence  that  he  can  be  so  inadequately  sam 
pled  by  detached  passages,  —  by  single  lines 
taken  away  from  the  connection  in  which  they 
contribute  to  the  general  effect.  He  has  that 
continuity  of  thought,  that  evenly  prolonged 
power,  and  that  delightful  equanimity,  which 
characterize  the  higher  orders  of  mind.  There 
is  something  in  him  of  the  disinterestedness  that 
made  the  Greeks  masters  in  art.  His  phrase  is 
never  importunate.  His  simplicity  is  that  of 
elegance,  not  of  poverty.  The  quiet  unconcern 
with  which  he  says  his  best  things  is  peculiar  to 
him  among  English  poets,  though  Goldsmith, 
Addison,  and  Thackeray  have  approached  it  in 
prose.  He  prattles  inadvertently  away,  and  all 
the  while,  like  the  princess  in  the  story,  lets  fall 
a  pearl  at  every  other  word.  It  is  such  a  piece 
of  good  luck  to  be  natural !  It  is  the  good  gift 
which  the  fairy  godmother  brings  to  her  prime 
favorites  in  the  cradle.  If  not  genius,  it  alone 
is  what  makes  genius  amiable  in  the  arts.  If  a 


CHAUCER  9 

man  have  it  not,  he  will  never  find  it,  for  when 
it  is  sought  it  is  gone. 

When  Chaucer  describes  anything,  it  is  com 
monly  by  one  of  those  simple  and  obvious  epi 
thets  or  qualities  that  are  so  easy  to  miss.  Is  it 
a  woman?  He  tells  us  she  is  fresh;  that  she 
has  glad  eyes ;  that  cc  every  day  her  beauty 
newed  "  ;  that 

((  Methought  all  fellowship  as  naked 
Withouten  her  that  I  saw  once, 
As  a  corone  without  the  stones." 

Sometimes  he  describes  amply  by  the  merest 
hint,  as  where  the  Friar,  before  setting  himself 
softly  down,  drives  away  the  cat.  We  know 
without  need  of  more  words  that  he  has  chosen 
the  snuggest  corner.  In  some  of  his  early  poems 
he  sometimes,  it  is  true,  falls  into  the  catalogue 
style  of  his  contemporaries;  but  after  he  had 
found  his  genius  he  never  particularizes  too 
much,  —  a  process  as  deadly  to  all  effect  as  an 
explanation  to  a  pun.  The  first  stanza  of  the 
"  Clerk's  Tale "  gives  us  a  landscape  whose 
stately  choice  of  objects  shows  a  skill  in  com 
position  worthy  of  Claude,  the  last  artist  who 
painted  nature  epically  :  — 

"  There  is  at  the  west  ende  of  Itaile, 
Down  at  the  foot  of  Vesulus  the  cold, 
A  lusty  plain  abundant  of  vitaile, 
Where  many  a  tower  and  town  thou  may'st  behold 
That  founded  were  in  time  of  fathers  old, 


io  CHAUCER 

And  many  another  delitable  sight; 
And  Saluces  this  noble  country  hight." 

The  Pre-Raphaelite  style  of  landscape  en 
tangles  the  eye  among  the  obtrusive  weeds  and 
grass-blades  of  the  foreground  which,  in  look 
ing  at  a  real  bit  of  scenery,  we  overlook ;  but 
what  a  sweep  of  vision  is  here  !  and  what  happy 
generalization  in  the  sixth  verse  as  the  poet  turns 
away  to  the  business  of  his  story  !  The  whole 
is  full  of  open  air. 

But  it  is  in  his  characters,  especially,  that  his 
manner  is  large  and  free ;  for  he  is  painting 
history,  though  with  the  fidelity  of  portrait.  He 
brings  out  strongly  the  essential  traits,  char 
acteristic  of  the  genius  rather  than  of  the  indi 
vidual.  The  Merchant  who  keeps  so  steady  a 
countenance  that 

"  There  wist  no  wight  that  he  was  e'er  in  debt,"  — 

the  Sergeant  at  Law,  "  who  seemed  busier  than 
he  was,"  the  Doctor  of  Medicine,  whose  "  study 
was  but  little  on  the  Bible,"  -in  all  these  cases 
it  is  the  type  and  not  the  personage  that  fixes 
his  attention.  William  Blake  says  truly,  though 
he  expresses  his  meaning  somewhat  clumsily, 
'  "  the  characters  of  Chaucer's  Pilgrims  are  the 
characters  which  compose  all  ages  and  nations. 
Some  of  the  names  and  titles  are  altered  by  time, 
but  the  characters  remain  forever  unaltered,  and 
consequently  they  are  the  physiognomies  and 


CHAUCER  ii 

lineaments  of  universal  human  life,beyond  which 
Nature  never  steps.  Names  alter,  things  never 
alter.  As  Newton  numbered  the  stars,  and  as 
Linnaeus  numbered  the  plants,  so  Chaucer  num 
bered  the  classes  of  men."  In  his  outside  acces 
sories,  it  is  true,  he  sometimes  seems  as  minute 
as  if  he  were  illuminating  a  missal.  Nothing 
escapes  his  sure  eye  for  the  picturesque,  —  the 
cut  of  the  beard,  the  soil  of  armor  on  the  buff 
jerkin,  the  rust  on  the  sword,  the  expression  of 
the  eye.  But  in  this  he  has  an  artistic  purpose. 
It  is  here  that  he  individualizes,  and,  while  every 
touch  harmonizes  with  and  seems  to  complete 
the  moral  features  of  the  character,  makes  us 
feel  that  we  are  among  living  men,  and  not 
the  abstracted  images  of  men.  Crabbe  adds 
particular  to  particular,  scattering  rather  than 
deepening  the  impression  of  reality,  and  making 
us  feel  as  if  every  man  were  a  species  by  him 
self;  but  Chaucer,  never  forgetting  the  essential 
sameness  of  human  nature,  makes  it  possible, 
and  even  probable,  that  his  motley  characters 
should  meet  on  a  common  footing,  while  he 
gives  to  each  the  expression  that  belongs  to  him, 
the  result  of  special  circumstance  or  training. 
Indeed,  the  absence  of  any  suggestion  of  caste 
cannot  fail  to  strike  any  reader  familiar  with  the 
literature  on  which  he  is  supposed  to  have  formed 
himself.  No  characters  are  at  once  so  broadly 
human  and  so  definitely  outlined  as  his.  Belong- 


12  CHAUCER 

ing,  some  of  them,  to  extinct  types,  they  con 
tinue  contemporary  and  familiar  forever.  So 
wide  is  the  difference  between  knowing  a  great 
many  men  and  that  knowledge  of  human  nature 
which  comes  of  sympathetic  insight  and  not  of 
observation  alone. 

It  is  this  power  of  sympathy  which  makes 
Chaucer's  satire  so  kindly,  —  more  so,  one  is 
tempted  to  say,  than  the  panegyric  of  Pope. 
Intellectual  satire  gets  its  force  from  personal 
or  moral  antipathy,  and  measures  offences  by 
some  rigid  conventional  standard.  Its  mouth 
waters  over  a  galling  word,  and  it  loves  to  say 
(ThoU)  pointing  out  its  victim  to  public  scorn. 
Indignatio  facit  versus,  it  boasts,  though  they 
might  as  often  be  fathered  on  envy  or  hatred. 
But  imaginative  satire,  warmed  through  and 
through  with  the  genial  leaven  of  humor,  smiles 
half  sadly  and  murmurs  We.  Chaucer  either 
makes  one  knave  betray  another,  through  a 
natural  jealousy  of  competition,  or  else  expose 
himself  with  a  naivete  of  good-humored  cyni 
cism  which  amuses  rather  than  disgusts.  In  the 
former  case  the  butt  has  a  kind  of  claim  on 
our  sympathy;  in  the  latter,  it  seems  nothing 
strange,  as  I  have  already  said,  if  the  sunny  at 
mosphere  which  floods  that  road  to  Canterbury 
should  tempt  anybody  to  throw  off  one  disguise 
after  another  without  suspicion.  With  perfect 
tact,  too,  the  Host  is  made  the  choragus  in  this 


CHAUCER  13 

diverse  company,  and  the  coarse  jollity  of  his 
temperament  explains,  if  it  do  not  excuse,  much 
that  would  otherwise  seem  out  of  keeping.  Surely 
nobody  need  have  any  scruples  with  him. 

Chaucer  seems  to  me  to  have  been  one  of  the 
most  purely  original  of  poets,  as  much  so  in 
respect  of  the  world  that  is  about  us  as  Dante 
in  respect  of  that  which  is  within  us.  There  had 
been  nothing  like  him  before,  there  has  been 
nothing  since.  He  is  original,  not  in  the  sense 
that  he  thinks  and  says  what  nobody  ever  thought 
and  said  before,  and  what  nobody  can  ever  think 
and  say  again,  but  because  he  is  always  natural, 
because,  if  not  always  absolutely  new,  he  is  al 
ways  delightfully  fresh,  because  he  sets  before 
us  the  world  as  it  honestly  appeared  to  Geoffrey 
Chaucer,  and  not  a  world  as  it  seemed  proper 
to  certain  people  that  it  ought  to  appear.  He 
found  that  the  poetry  which  had  preceded  him 
had  been  first  the  expression  of  individual  feel 
ing,  then  of  class  feeling  as  the  vehicle  of  legend 
and  history,  and  at  last  had  well-nigh  lost  itself 
in  chasing  the  mirage  of  allegory.  Literature 
seemed  to  have  passed  through  the  natural 
stages  which  at  regular  intervals  bring  it  to  de 
cline.  Even  the  lyrics  of  the  jongleurs  were  all 
run  in  one  mould,  and  the  Pastourelles  of  North 
ern  France  had  become  as  artificial  as  the  Pasto 
rals  of  Pope.  The  Romances  of  chivalry  had 
been  made  over  into  prose,  and  the  "  Melusine  " 


i4  CHAUCER 

of  his  contemporary  Jehan  d* Arras  is  the  for 
lorn  hope  of  the  modern  novel.  Arrived  thus 
far  in  their  decrepitude,  the  monks  endeavored 
to  give  them  a  religious  and  moral  turn  by  alle 
gorizing  them.  Their  process  reminds  one  of 
something  Ulloa  tells  us  of  the  fashion  in  which 
the  Spaniards  converted  the  Mexicans  :  "  Here 
we  found  an  old  man  in  a  cavern  so  extremely 
aged  as  it  was  wonderful,  which  could  neither 
see  nor  go  because  he  was  so  lame  and  crooked. 
The  Father,  Friar  Raimund,  said  it  were  good 
(seeing  he  was  so  aged)  to  make  him  a  Chris 
tian  ;  whereupon  we  baptized  him."  The  monks 
found  the  Romances  in  the  same  stage  of  senil 
ity,  and  gave  them  a  saving  sprinkle  with  the 
holy  water  of  allegory.  Perhaps  they  were  only 
trying  to  turn  the  enemy's  own  weapons  against 
himself,  for  it  was  the  free-thinking  "  Romance 
of  the  Rose"  that  more  than  anything  else  had 
made  allegory  fashionable.  Plutarch  tells  us 
that  an  allegory  is  to  say  one  thing  where  an 
other  is  meant,  and  this  might  have  been  need 
ful  for  the  personal  security  of  Jean  de  Meung, 
as  afterwards  for  that  of  his  successor,  Rabelais. 
But,  except  as  a  means  of  evading  the  fagot,  the 
method  has  few  recommendations.  It  reverses 
the  true  office  of  poetry  by  making  the  real  un 
real.  It  is  imagination  endeavoring  to  recom 
mend  itself  to  the  understanding  by  means  of 
cuts.  If  an  author  be  in  such  deadly  earnest, 


CHAUCER  15 

or  if  his  imagination  be  of  such  creative  vigor 
as  to  project  real  figures  when  it  meant  to  cast 
only  a  shadow  upon  vapor  ;  if  the  true  spirit 
come,  at  once  obsequious  and  terrible,  when  the 
conjurer  has  drawn  his  circle  and  gone  through 
with  his  incantations  merely  to  produce  a  proper 
frame  of  mind  in  his  audience,  as  was  the  case 
with  Dante,  there  is  no  longer  any  question  of 
allegory  as  the  word  and  thing  are  commonly 
understood.  But  with  all  secondary  poets,  as 
with  Spenser  for  example,  the  allegory  does  not 
become  of  one  substance  with  the  poetry,  but 
is  a  kind  of  carven  frame  for  it,  whose  figures 
lose  their  meaning,  as  they  cease  to  be  contem 
porary.  It  was  not  a  style  that  could  have  much 
attraction  for  a  nature  so  sensitive  to  the  actual, 
so  observant  of  it,  so  interested  by  it,  as  that 
of  Chaucer.  He  seems  to  have  tried  his  hand 
at  all  the  forms  in  vogue,  and  to  have  arrived 
in  his  old  age  at  the  truth,  essential  to  all  really 
great  poetry,  that  his  own  instincts  were  his 
safest  guides,  that  there  is  nothing  deeper  in 
life  than  life  itself,  and  that  to  conjure  an  alle 
gorical  significance  into  it  was  to  lose  sight  of 
its  real  meaning.  He  of  all  men  could  not  say 
one  thing  and  mean  another,  unless  by  way  of 
humorous  contrast. 

In  thus  turning  frankly  and  gayly  to  the  ac 
tual  world,  and  drinking  inspiration  from  sources 
open  to  all;  in  turning  away  from  a  colorless 


16  CHAUCER 

abstraction  to  the  solid  earth  and  to  emotions 
common  to  every  pulse ;  in  discovering  that  to 
make  the  best  of  Nature,  and  not  to  grope 
vaguely  after  something  better  than  Nature,  was 
the  true  office  of  Art;  in  insisting  on  a  definite 
purpose,  on  veracity,  cheerfulness,  and  simplic 
ity,  Chaucer  shows  himself  the  true  father  and 
founder  of  what  is  characteristically  English  lit 
erature.  He  has  a  hatred  of  cant  as  hearty  as 
Dr.  Johnson's,  though  he  has  a  slier  way  of 
showing  it;  he  has  the  placid  common  sense  of 
Franklin,  the  sweet,  grave  humor  of  Addison, 
the  exquisite  taste  of  Gray;  but  the  whole  tex 
ture  of  his  mind,  though  its  substance  seem 
plain  and  grave,  shows  itself  at  every  turn  iri 
descent  with  poetic  feeling  like  shot  silk.  Above 
all,  he  has  an  eye  for  character  that  seems  to 
have  caught  at  once  not  only  its  mental  and 
physical  features,  but  even  its  expression  in 
variety  of  costume,  —  an  eye,  indeed,  second 
only,  if  it  should  be  called  second  in  some 
respects,  to  that  of  Shakespeare. 

I  know  of  nothing  that  may  be  compared 
with  the  Prologue  to  the  "  Canterbury  Tales/' 
and  with  that  to  the  story  of  the  "  Chanon's 
Yeoman  "  before  Chaucer.  Characters  and  por 
traits  from  real  life  had  never  been  drawn 
with  such  discrimination,  or  with  such  variety, 
never  with  such  bold  precision  of  outline,  and 
with  such  a  lively  sense  of  the  picturesque. 


CHAUCER  17 

His  Parson  is  still  unmatched,  though  Dryden 
and  Goldsmith  have  both  tried  their  hands  in 
emulation  of  him.  And  the  humor  also  in  its 
suavity,  its  perpetual  presence  and  its  shy 
unobtrusiveness,  is  something  wholly  new  in 
literature.  For  anything  that  deserves  to  be 
called  like  it  in  English  we  must  wait  for 
Henry  Fielding. 

Chaucer  is  the  first  great  poet  who  has  treated 
To-day  as  if  it  were  as  good  as  Yesterday,  the 
first  who  held  up  a  mirror  to  contemporary 
life  in  its  infinite  variety  of  high  and  low,  of 
humor  and  pathos.  But  he  reflected  life  in  its 
large  sense  as  the  life  of  men,  from  the  knight 
to  the  ploughman,  —  the  life  of  every  day  as  it 
is  made  up  of  that  curious  compound  of  human 
nature  with  manners.  The  very  form  of  the 
"Canterbury  Tales"  was  imaginative.  The  gar 
den  of  Boccaccio,  the  supper-party  of  Grazzini, 
and  the  voyage  of  Giraldi  make  a  good  enough 
thread  for  their  stories,  but  exclude  all  save 
equals  and  friends,  exclude  consequently  human 
nature  in  its  wider  meaning.  But  by  choosing 
a  pilgrimage,  Chaucer  puts  us  on  a  plane  where 
all  men  are  equal,  with  souls  to  be  saved,  and 
with  another  world  in  view  that  abolishes  all 
distinctions.  By  this  choice,  and  by  making 
the  Host  of  the  Tabard  always  the  central 
figure,  he  has  happily  united  the  two  most  famil 
iar  emblems  of  life,  —  the  short  journey  and 


i8  CHAUCER 

the  inn.  We  find  more  and  more  as  we  study 
him  that  he  rises  quietly  from  the  conventional 
to. the  universal,  and  may  fairly  take  his  place 
with  Homer  in  virtue  of  the  breadth  of  his  hu 
manity. 

In  spite  of  some  external  stains,  which  those 
who  have  studied  the  influence  of  manners  will 
easily  account  for  without  imputing  them  to  any 
moral  depravity,  we  feel  that  we  can  join  the 
pure-minded  Spenser  in  calling  him  "most  sa 
cred,  happy  spirit."  If  character  may  be  divined 
from  works,  he  was  a  good  man,  genial,  sincere, 
hearty,  temperate  of  mind,  more  wise,  perhaps, 
for  this  world  than  the  next,  but  thoroughly 
humane,  and  friendly  with  God  and  men.  I 
know  not  how  to  sum  up  what  we  feel  about 
him  better  than  by  saying  (what  would  have 
pleased  most  one  who  was  indifferent  to  fame) 
that  we  love  him  more  even  than  we  admire. 
We  are  sure  that  here  was  a  true  brother-man 
so  kindly  that,  in  his  House  of  Fame,  after 
naming  the  great  poets,  he  throws  in  a  pleasant 
word  for  the  oaten-pipes 

"  Of  the  little  herd-grooms 
That  keepen  beasts  among  the  brooms.*' 

No  better  inscription  can  be  written  on  the  first 
page  of  his  works  than  that  which  he  places  over 
the  gate  in  his  Assembly  of  Fowls,  and  which 
contrasts  so  sweetly  with  the  stern  lines  of  Dante 
from  which  they  were  imitated  :  — 


CHAUCER  19 

«'  Through  me  men  go  into  the  blissful  place 
Of  the  heart's  heal  and  deadly  woundeV  cure; 
Through  me  men  go  unto  the  well  of  Grace, 
Where  green  and  lusty  May  doth  ever  endure; 
This  is  the  way  to  all  good  aventure; 
Be  glad,  thou  Reader,  and  thy  sorrow  offcast, 
All  open  am  I,  pass  in,  and  speed  thee  fast  ! " 


MILTON1 

1872 

MI  LTON  was  a  harmonist  rather  than  a 
melodist.  There  are,  no  doubt,  some 
exquisite  melodies  (like  the  "Sabrina 
Fair")  among  his  earlier  poems,  as  could  hardly 
fail  to  be  the  case  in  an  age  which  produced  or 
trained  the  authors  of  our  best  English  glees, 
as  ravishing  in  their  instinctive  felicity  as  the 
songs  of  our  dramatists,  but  he  also  showed 
from  the  first  that  larger  style  which  was  to  be 
his  peculiar  distinction.  The  strain  heard  in 
the  "Nativity  Ode,"  in  the  "Solemn  Music," 
and  in  "  Lycidas,"  is  of  a  higher  mood,  as  re 
gards  metrical  construction,  than  anything  that 

1  The  Life  of  John  Milton :  narrated  in  Connection  with 
the  Political,  Ecclesiastical,  and  Literary  History  of  his  Time. 
By  David  Masson,  M.A.,  LL.D.,  Professor  of  Rhetoric  and 
English  Literature  in  the  University  of  Edinburgh.  Vols.  i., 
ii,  1638-1643.  London  and  New  York  :  Macmillan  &  Co. 
1871.,  8vo,  pp.  xii,  608. 

The  Poetical  Works  of  John  Milton,  edited,  with  Intro 
duction,  Notes,  and  an  Essay  on  Milton's  English,  by  David 
Masson,  M.A.,  LL.D.,  Professor  of  Rhetoric  and  English 
Literature  in  the  University  of  Edinburgh.  3  vols.  8vo. 
Macmillan  &  Co.  1874. 


MILTON  21 

had  thrilled  the  English  ear  before,  giving  no 
uncertain  augury  of  him  who  was  to  show  what 
sonorous  metal  lay  silent  till  he  touched  the 
keys  in  the  epical  organ-pipes  of  our  various 
language,  that  have  never  since  felt  the  strain 
of  such  prevailing  breath.  It  was  in  the  larger 
movements  of  metre  that  Milton  was  great  and 
original.  I  have  spoken  elsewhere  of  Spenser's 
fondness  for  dilation  as  respects  thoughts  and 
images.  In  Milton  it  extends  to  the  language 
also,  and  often  to  the  single  words  of  which  a 
period  is  composed.  He  loved  phrases  of  tower 
ing  port,  in  which  every  member  dilated  stands 
like  Teneriffe  or  Atlas.  In  those  poems  and 
passages  that  stamp  him  great,  the  verses  do 
not  dance  interweaving  to  soft  Lydian  airs,  but 
march  rather  with  resounding  tread  and  clang 
of  martial  music.  It  is  true  that  he  is  cunning 
in  alliterations,  so  scattering  them  that  they  tell 
in  his  orchestra  without  being  obvious,  but  it 
is  in  the  more  scientific  region  of  open-voweled 
assonances  which  seem  to  proffer  rhyme  and  yet 
withhold  it  (rljyme-wraiths  one  might  call  them), 
that  he  is  an  artist  and  a  master.  He  even  some 
times  introduces  rhyme  with  misleading  intervals 
between  and  unobviously  in  his  blank  verse  :  — 
"  There  rest,  if  any  rest  can  harbour  there  ; 

And,  reassembling  our  afflicted  powers,       >.       j. 
Consult  how  we  may  henceforth  most  offend       '  * 
Our  enemy,  our  own  loss  how  repair, 
.  How  overcome  this  dire  calamity, 


22  MILTON 

What  reinforcement  we  may  gain  from  hope, 
If  not,  what  resolution  from  des/w'r."  » 

There  is  one  almost  perfect  quatrain,  - 
"  Before  thy  fellows,  ambitious  to  win 

From  me  some  plume,  that  thy  success  may  show 
Destruction  to  the  rest.    This  pause  between 
(Unanswered  lest  thou  boast)  to  let  thee  know  "; — 

and  another  hardly  less  so,  of  a  rhyme  and  an 

assonance,  — 

"  If  once  they  hear  that  voice,  their  liveliest  pledge 
Of  hope  in  fears  and  dangers,  heard  so  oft 
In  worst  extremes  and  on  the  perilous  edge 
Of  battle  when  it  raged,  in  all  assaults.'* 

There  can  be  little  doubt  that  the  rhymes  in 
the  first  passage  cited  were  intentional,  and  per 
haps  they  were  so  in  the  others;  but  Milton's 
ear  has  tolerated  not  a  few  perfectly  rhyming 
couplets,  and  others  in  which  the  assonance 
almost  becomes  rhyme,  certainly  a  fault  in  blank 
verse :  — 

«'  From  the  Asian  Kings  (and  Parthian  among  these), 
From  India  and  the  Golden  Chersonese"; 

"That  soon  refreshed  him  wearied,  and  repaired 
What  hunger,  if  aught  hunger,  had  impaired"; 

"  And  will  alike  be  punished,  whether  thou 
Reign  or  reign  not,  though  to  that  gentle  brow"; 

1  I  think  Coleridge's  nice  ear  would  have  blamed  the  near 
ness  of  enemy  and  calamity  in  this  passage.  Mr.  Masson 
leaves  out  the  comma  after  If  not,  the  pause  of  which  is  need 
ful,  I  think,  to  the  sense,  and  certainly  to  keep  not  a  little 
farther  apart  from  what,  ("  leach  each  "  !) 


MILTON  23 

"  Of  pleasure,  but  all  pleasure  to  destroy, 
Save  what  is  in  destroying,  other  joy  "; 

"  Shall  all  be  Paradise,  far  happier  place 
Than  this  of  Eden,  and  far  happier  days  ' ' ; 

"  This  my  long  sufferance  and  my  day  of  grace 
They  who  neglect  and  scorn  shall  never  taste"; 

"So  far  remote  with  diminution  seen, 
First  in  his  East  the  glorious  lamp  was  seen."  l 

These  examples  (and  others  might  be  adduced) 
serve  to  show  that  Milton's  ear  was  too  busy 
about  the  larger  interests  of  his  measures  to  be 
always  careful  of  the  lesser.  He  was  a  strategist 
rather  than  a  drill-sergeant  in  verse,  capable, 
beyond  any  other  English  poet,  of  putting  great 
masses  through  the  most  complicated  evolutions 
without  clash  or  confusion,  but  he  was  not  curi 
ous  that  every  foot  should  be  at  the  same  angle. 
In  reading  "  Paradise  Lost  "  one  has  a  feeling 
of  vastness.  You  float  under  an  illimitable  sky, 
brimmed  with  sunshine  or  hung  with  constella 
tions  ;  the  abysses  of  space  are  about  you  ;  you 
hear  the  cadenced  surges  of  an  unseen  ocean  ; 
thunders  mutter  round  the  horizon  ;  and  if  the 
scene  change,  iti-s  with  an  elemental  movement 
like  the  shifting  of  mighty  winds.  His  imagina 
tion  seldom  condenses,  like  Shakespeare's,  in 
the  kindling  flash  of  a  single  epithet,  but  loves 
better  to  diffuse  itself.  Witness  his  descriptions, 

1  "  First  in  his  East,"  is  not  soothing  to  the  ear. 


24  MILTON 

wherein  he  seems  to  circle  like  an  eagle  bathing 
in  the  blue  streams  of  air,  controlling  with  his 
eye  broad  sweeps  of  champaign  or  of  sea,  and 
rarely  fulmining  in  the  sudden  swoop  of  intenser 
expression.  He  was  fonder  of  the  vague,  perhaps 
I  should  rather  say  the  indefinite,  where  more 
is  meant  than  meets  the  ear,  than  any  other  of 
our  poets.  He  loved  epithets  (like  old  and  far] 
that  suggest  great  reaches,  whether  of  space  or 
time.  This  bias  shows  itself  already  in  his 
earlier  poems,  as  where  he  hears 

"  The/};r  ^"curfew  sound 

Over  some  widcwatered  shore," 

or  where  he  fancies  the  shores  and  sounding 
seas  washing  Lycidas  far  away  ;  but  it  reaches 
its  climax  in  the  "  Paradise  Lost."  He  pro 
duces  his  effects  by  dilating  our  imaginations 
with  an  impalpable  hint  rather  than  by  concen 
trating  them  upon  too  precise  particulars.  Thus 
in  a  famous  comparison  of  his,  the  fleet  has  no 
definite  port,  but  plies  stemming  nightly  toward 
the  pole  in  a  wide  ocean  of  conjecture.  He  gen 
eralizes  always  instead  of  specifying,  —  the  true 
secret  of  the  ideal  treatment  in  which  he  is  with 
out  peer,  and,  though  everywhere  grandiose,  he 
is  never  turgid.  Tasso  begins  finely  with 

'*  Chiama  gli  abitator  dell*  ombre  eternc 
II  rauco  suon  della  tartarea  tromba; 
Treman  le  spaziosc  atre  caverne, 
E  T  aer  cieco  a  quel  rumor  rimbomba," 


MILTON  25 

but  soon  spoils  all  by  condescending  to  definite 
comparisons  with  thunder  and  intestinal  convul 
sions  of  the  earth  ;  in  other  words,  he  is  unwary 
enough  to  give  us  a  standard  of  measurement, 
and  the  moment  you  furnish  Imagination  with 
a  yardstick  she  abdicates  in  favor  of  her  statis 
tical  poor-relation  Commonplace.  Milton,  with 
this  passage  in  his  memory,  is  too  wise  to  ham 
per  himself  with  any  statement  for  which  he 
can  be  brought  to  book,  but  wraps  himself  in  a 
mist  of  looming  indefiniteness  ;  — 

"  He  called  so  loud  that  all  the  hollow  deep 
Of  hell  resounded;" 

thus  amplifying  more  nobly  by  abstention  from 
his  usual  method  of  prolonged  evolution.  No 
caverns,  however  spacious,  will  serve  his  turn, 
because  they  have  limits.  He  could  practise  this 
self-denial  when  his  artistic  sense  found  it  need 
ful,  whether  for  variety  of  verse  or  for  the  greater 
intensity  of  effect  to  be  gained  by  abruptness, 
His  more  elaborate  passages  have  the  multitu 
dinous  roll  of  thunder,  dying  away  to  gather  a 
sullen  force  again  from  its  own  reverberations, 
but  he  knew  that  the  attention  is  recalled  and 
arrested  by  those  claps  that  stop  short  without 
echo  and  leave  us  listening.  There  are  no  such 
vistas  and  avenues  of  verse  as  his.  In  reading 
the  "  Paradise  Lost"  one  has  a  feeling  of  spa 
ciousness  such  as  no  other  poet  gives.  Milton's 
respect  for  himself  and  for  his  own  mind  and 


26  MILTON 

its  movements  rises  well-nigh  to  veneration.  He 
prepares  the  way  for  his  thought  and  spreads  on 
the  ground  before  the  sacred  feet  of  his  verse 
tapestries  inwoven  with  figures  of  mythology 
and  romance.  There  is  no  such  unfailing  dignity 
as  his.  Observe  at  what  a  reverent  distance  he 
begins  when  he  is  about  to  speak  of  himself,  as 
at  the  beginning  of  the  Third  Book  and  the 
Seventh.  His  sustained  strength  is  especially 
felt  in  his  beginnings.  He  seems  always  to  start 
full-sail  ;  the  wind  and  tide  always  serve;  there 
is  never  any  fluttering  of  the  canvas.  In  this  he 
offers  a  striking  contrast  with  Wordsworth,  who 
has  to  go  through  with  a  great  deal  ofyo-heave- 
ohing  before  he  gets  under  way.  And  though, 
in  the  didactic  parts  of  "  Paradise  Lost,"  the 
wind  dies  away  sometimes,  there  is  a  long  swell 
that  will  not  let  us  forget  it,  and  ever  and  anon 
some  eminent  verse  lifts  its  long  ridge  above  its 
tamer  peers  heaped  with  stormy  memories.  And 
the  poem  never  becomes  incoherent ;  we  feel  all 
through  it,  as  in  the  symphonies  of  Beethoven, 
a  great  controlling  reason  in  whose  safe-conduct 
we  trust  implicitly. 

Mr.  Masson's  discussions  of  Milton's  Eng 
lish  are,  it  seems  to  me,  for  the  most  part  un 
satisfactory.  He  occupies  some  trn  pages,  for 
example,  with  a  history  of  the  genitival  form  itsy 
which  adds  nothing  to  our  previous  knowledge 
on  the  subject  and  which  has  no  relation  to 


MILTON  27 

Milton  except  for  its  bearing  on  the  author 
ship  of  some  verses  attributed  to  him  against 
the  most  overwhelming  internal  evidence  to  the 
contrary.  Mr.  Masson  is  altogether  too  reso 
lute  to  find  traces  of  what  he  calls  oddly  enough 
"  recollectiveness  of  Latin  constructions "  in 
Milton,  and  scents  them  sometimes  in  what 
would  seem  to  the  uninstructed  reader  very 
idiomatic  English.  More  than  once,  at  least, 
he  has  fancied  them  by  misunderstanding  the 
passage  in  which  they  seem  to  occur.  Thus, 
in  "Paradise  Lost,"  xi.  520,  521, — 

"  Therefore  so  abject  is  their  punishment, 

Disfiguring  not  God's  likeness  but  their  own,"  — 

has  no  analogy  with  eorum  deformantium,  for  the 
context  shows  that  it  is  the  punishment  which 
disfigures.  Indeed,  Mr.  Masson  so  often  finds 
constructions  difficult,  ellipses  strange,  and  words 
needing  annotation  that  are  common  to  all 
poetry,  nay,  sometimes  to  all  English,  that  his 
notes  seem  not  seldom  to  have  been  written  by 
a  foreigner.  On  this  passage  in  "  Comus,"  — 

"  I  do  not  think  my  sister  so  to  seek 
Or  so  unprincipled  in  virtue's  book 
And  the  sweet  peace  that  virtue  bosoms  ever 
As  that  the  single  want  of  light  and  noise 
(Not  being  in  danger,  as  I  trust  she  is  not) 
Could  stir  the  constant  mood  of  her  calm  thoughts," 

Mr.  Masson  tells  us,  that  "  in  very  strict  con- 


28  MILTON 

struction,  not  being  would  cling  to  want  as  its 
substantive ;  but  the  phrase  passes  for  the  Latin 
ablative  absolute."  Soon  the  words  forestalling 
night,  "  i.  e.  anticipating.  Forestalls  literally  to 
anticipate  the  market  by  purchasing  goods  be 
fore  they  are  brought  to  the  stall."  In  the  verse 

*'  Thou  hast  immanacled  while  Heaven  sees  good," 

he  explains  that  "  while  here  has  the  sense  of  so 
long  as."  But  Mr.  Masson's  notes  on  the  lan 
guage  are  his  weakest.  He  is  careful  to  tell  us, 
for  example,  "  that  there  are  instances  of  the  use 
of  shine  as  a  substantive  in  Spenser,  Ben  Jonson, 
and  other  poets."  It  is  but  another  way  of  spell 
ing  sheen,  and  if  Mr.  Masson  never  heard  a 
shoeblack  in  the  street  say,  "  Shall  I  give  you 
a  shine,  sir?"  his  experience  has  been  singular. 
His  notes  in  general  are  very  good  (though  too 
long).  Those  on  the  astronomy  of  Milton  are 
particularly  valuable.  I  think  he  is  sometimes 
a  little  too  scornful  of  parallel  passages,1  for  if 
there  is  one  thing  more  striking  than  another 
in  this  poet,  it  is  that  his  great  and  original  im 
agination  was  almost  wholly  nourished  by  books, 
perhaps  I  should  rather  say  set  in  motion  by 

1  A  passage  from  Dante  (Inferno,  xi.  96-105),  with  its 
reference  to  Aristotle,  would  have  given  him  the  meaning  of 
"  Nature  taught  art,"  which  seems  to  puz7.1e  him.  A  study 
of  Dante  and  of  his  earlier  commentators  would  also  have  beer 
of  great  service  in  the  astronomical  notes. 


MILTON  29 

them.  It  is  wonderful  how,  from  the  most 
withered  and  juiceless  hint  gathered  in  his  read 
ing,  his  grand  images  rise  like  an  exhalation  ; 
how  from  the  most  battered  old  lamp  caught  in 
that  huge  drag-net  with  which  he  swept  the 
waters  of  learning,  he  could  conjure  a  tall  genius 
to  build  his  palaces.  Whatever  he  touches  swells 
and  towers.  That  wonderful  passage  in  "  Co- 
mus "  of  the  airy  tongues,  perhaps  the  most 
imaginative  in  suggestion  he  ever  wrote,  was 
conjured  out  of  a  dry  sentence  in  Purchas's  ab 
stract  of  Marco  Polo.  Such  examples  help  us 
to  understand  the  poet.  When  I  find  that  Sir 
Thomas  Browne  had  said  before  Milton,  that 
Adam  "was  the  wisest  of  all  men  since"  I  am 
glad  to  find  this  link  between  the  most  profound 
and  the  most  stately  imagination  of  that  age. 
Such  parallels  sometimes  give  a  hint  also  of 
the  historical  development  of  our  poetry,  of 
its  apostolical  succession,  so  to  speak.  Every 
one  has  noticed  Milton's  fondness  of  sonorous 
proper  names,  which  have  not  only  an  acquired 
imaginative  value  by  association,  and  so  serve 
to  awaken  our  poetic  sensibilities,  but  have 
likewise  a  merely  musical  significance.  This  he 
probably  caught  from  Marlowe,  traces  of  whom 
are  frequent  in  him.  There  is  certainly  some 
thing  of  what  afterwards  came  to  be  called  Mil- 
tonic  in  more  than  one  passage  of  "  Tambur- 
laine,"  a  play  in  which  gigantic  force  seems 


3°  MILTON 

struggling  from  the  block,asin  Michael  Angelo's 
Dawn. 

Mr.  Masson's  remarks  on  the  versification 
of  Milton  are,  in  the  main, judicious,  but  when 
he  ventures  on  particulars,  one  cannot  always 
agree  with  him.  He  seems  to  understand  that 
our  prosody  is  accentual  merely,  and  yet,  when 
he  comes  to  what  he  calls  variations,  he  talks  of 
the  "substitution  of  the  Trochee,  the  Pyrrhic,  or 
the  Spondee,  for  the  regular  Iambus,  or  of  the 
Anapaest,  the  Dactyl,  the  Tribrach,  etc.,  for  the 
same.'*  This  is  always  misleading.  The  shift 
of  the  accent  in  what  Mr.  Masson  calls  "  dis 
syllabic  variations  "  is  common  to  all  pentameter 
verse,  and,  in  the  other  case,  most  of  the  words 
cited  as  trisyllables  either  were  not  so  in  Milton's 
day,1  or  were  so  or  not  at  choice  of  the  poet,  ac 
cording  to  their  place  in  the  verse.  There  is  not 
an  elision  of  Milton's  without  precedent  in  the 
dramatists  from  whom  he  learned  to  write  blank 
verse.  Milton  was  a  greater  metrist  than  any  of 
them,  except  Marlowe  and  Shakespeare,  and  he 
employed  the  elision  (or  the  slur)  oftener  than 
they  to  give  a  faint  undulation  or  retardation  to 
his  verse,  only  because  his  epic  form  demanded 

1  Almost  every  combination  of  two  vowels  might  in  those 
days  be  a  diphthong  or  not,  at  will.  Milton's  practice  of  elision 
was  confirmed  and  sometimes  (perhaps)  modified  by  his  study 
of  the  Italians,  with  whose  usage  in  this  respect  he  closely 
conforms. 


MILTON  31 

it  more  for  variety's  sake.  How  Milton  would 
have  read  them,  is  another  question.  He  cer 
tainly  often  marked  them  by  an  apostrophe 
in  his  manuscripts.  He  doubtless  composed 
according  to  quantity,  so  far  as  that  is  possible 
in  English,  and  as  Cowper  somewhat  extrava 
gantly  says,  "  gives  almost  as  many  proofs  of  it 
in  his  f  Paradise  Lost '  as  there  are  lines  in  the 
poem."1  But  when  Mr.  Masson  tells  us  that 

"  Self- fed  and  self-consumed:  if  this  fail," 
and 

«'  Dwells  in  all  Heaven  charity  so  rare/' 

are  "  only  nine  syllables,'*  and  that  in 

"  Created  hugest  that  swim  the  ocean-stream," 

"  either  the  third  foot  must  be  read  as  an  ana 
paest  or  the  word  hugest  must  be  pronounced 
as  one  syllable,  hugst"  I  think  Milton  would 
have  invoked  the  soul  of  Sir  John  Cheek.  Of 
course  Milton  read  it 

"  Created  hugest  that  swim  th'  ocean-stream,"  — 

just  as  he  wrote  (if  we  may  trust  Mr.  Mas- 
son's  facsimile) 

"  Thus  sang  the  uncouth  swain  to  th'  oaks  and  rills,"  — 

a  verse  in  which  both  hiatus  and  elision  occur 
precisely  as  in  the  Italian  poets.2  "  Gest  that 

1  Letter  to  Rev.  W.  Bagot,  4th  January,  1791. 

a  So  Dante:  — 

u  Ma  sapienza  e  amore  e  virtute." 
So  Donne:  — 

"  Simony  and  sodomy  in  churchmen's  lives." 


32  MILTON 

swim  "  would  be  rather  a  knotty  anapaest,  an 
insupportable  foot  indeed  !  And  why  is  even 
hug  st  worse  than  Shakespeare's 

"  Young1  st  follower  of  thy  drum  "  ? 
In  the  same  way  he  says  of 

"  For  we  have  also  our  evening  and  our  morn," 

that  "the  metre  of  this  line  is  irregular,"  and 
of  the  rapidly  fine 

"  Came  flying  and  in  mid  air  aloud  thus  cried,' 

that  it  is  "  a  line  of  unusual  metre."  Why  more 
unusual  than 

"  As  being  the  contrary  to  his  high  will  "  ? 

What  would  Mr.  Masson  say  to  these  three 
verses  from  Dekkar  ?  — 

"  And  knowing  so  much,  I  muse  thou  art  so  poor"; 

"  I  fan  away  the  &\istfying  in  mine  eyes  "; 

«'  Flowing  o'er  with  court  news  only  of  you  and  them." 

All  such  participles  (where  no  consonant  di 
vided  the  vowels)  were  normally  of  one  sylla 
ble,  permissibly  of  two.1  If  Mr.  Masson  had 
studied  the  poets  who  preceded  Milton  as  he 

1  Mr.  Masson  is  evidently  not  very  familiar  at  first  hand 
with  the  versification  to  which  Milton's  youthful  ear  had  been 
trained,  but  seems  to  have  learned  something  from  Abbott's 
Shakespearian  Grammar  in  the  interval  between  writing  his 
notes  and  his  Introduction.  Walker's  Shakespeari  s  Versifica 
tion  would  have  been  a  great  help  to  him  in  default  of  original 
knowledge. 


MILTON  33 

has  studied  him,  he  would  never  have  said  that 
the  verse  — 

"  Not  this  rock  only;  his  omnipresence  fills  "  — 

was  "  peculiar  as  having  a  distinct  syllable  of 
over-measure."  He  retains  Milton's  spelling 
of  hunderd  without  perceiving  the  metrical  rea 
son  for  it,  that  dy  /,  />,  /£,  etc.,  followed  by  /  or  r, 
might  be  either  of  two  or  of  three  syllables.  In 
Marlowe  we  find  it  both  ways  in  two  consecu 
tive  verses  :  — 

"  A  hundred  plundered]  and  fifty  thousand  horse, 
Two  hundred  thousand  foot,  brave  men  at  arms."  T 

Mr.  Masson  is  especially  puzzled  by  verses 
ending  in  one  or  more  unaccented  syllables,  and 
even  argues  in  his  Introduction  that  some  of 
them  might  be  reckoned  Alexandrines.  He 
cites  some  lines  of  Spenser  as  confirming  his 
theory,  forgetting  that  rhyme  wholly  changes 
the  conditions  of  the  case  by  throwing  the  ac 
cent  (appreciably  even  now,  but  more  emphatic 
ally  in  Spenser's  day)  on  the  last  syllable. 

"  A  spirit  and  judgment  equal  or  superior," 

he  calls  "a  remarkably  anomalous  line,  consist 
ing  of  twelve  or  even  thirteen  syllables."  Surely 
Milton's  ear  would  never  have  tolerated  a  dis- 

1  Milton  has  a  verse  in   Comus  where  the  e  is  elided  from 
the  word  sister  by  its  preceding  a  vowel:  — 

"  Heaven  keep  my  sister  !    again,  again,  and  near  !  " 

This  would  have  been  impossible  before  a  consonant. 


34  iMILTON 

syllabic  "  spirit  "  in  such  a  position.  The  word 
was  then  more  commonly  of  one  syllable,  though 
it  might  be  two,  and  was  accordingly  spelt  spreet 
(still  surviving  in  sprite],  sprit,  and  even  spirt,  as 
Milton  himself  spells  it  in  one  of  Mr.  Masson's 
facsimiles.1  Shakespeare,  in  the  verse 

"  Hath  put  a  spirit  of  youth  in  everything," 

uses  the  word  admirably  well  in  a  position  where 
it  cannot  have  a  metrical  value  of  more  than  one 
syllable,  while  it  gives  a  dancing  movement  to 
the  verse  in  keeping  with  the  sense.  Our  old 
metrists  were  careful  of  elasticity,  a  quality 
which  modern  verse  has  lost  in  proportion  as 
our  language  has  stiffened  into  uniformity  under 
the  benumbing  fingers  of  pedants. 

This  discussion  of  the  value  of  syllables  is  not 
so  trifling  as  it  seems.  A  great  deal  of  nonsense 
has  been  written  about  imperfect  measures  in 
Shakespeare,  and  of  the  admirable  dramatic  ef 
fect  produced  by  filling  up  the  gaps  of  missing 
syllables  with  pauses  or  prolongations  of  the 
voice  in  reading.  In  rapid,  abrupt,  and  pas 
sionate  dialogue  this  is  possible,  but  in  passages 
of  continuously  level  speech  it  is  barbarously 
absurd.  I  do  not  believe  that  any  of  our  old 
dramatists  has  knowingly  left  us  a  single  im 
perfect  verse.  Seeing  in  what  a  haphazard  way 

1  So  spirito  and  s pir to  in  Italian,  esperis  and  fspirs  in  Old 
French. 


MILTON  35 

and  in  how  mutilated  a  form  their  plays  have 
mostly  reached  us,  we  should  attribute  such 
faults  (as  a  geologist  would  call  them)  to  any 
thing  rather  than  to  the  deliberate  design  of  the 
poets.  Marlowe  and  Shakespeare,  the  two  best 
metrists  among  them,  have  given  us  a  standard 
by  which  to  measure  what  licenses  they  took  in 
versification,  —  the  one  in  his  translations,  the 
other  in  his  poems.  The  unmanageable  verses 
in  Milton  are  very  few,  and  all  of  them  occur  in 
works  printed  after  his  blindness  had  lessened 
the  chances  of  supervision  and  increased  those 
of  error.  There  are  only  two,  indeed,  which 
seem  to  me  wholly  indigestible  as  they  stand. 
These  are, 

"  Burnt  after  them  to  the  bottomless  pit," 

and 

"  With  them  from  bliss  to  the  bottomless  deep.'* 

This  certainly  looks  like  a  case  where  a  word 
had  dropped  out  or  had  been  stricken  out  by 
some  proof-reader  who  limited  the  number  of 
syllables  in  a  pentameter  verse  by  that  of  his 
finger-ends.  Mr.  Masson  notices  only  the  first 
of  these  lines,  and  says  that  to  make  it  regular 
by  accenting  the  word  bottomless  on  the  second 
syllable  would  be  "  too  horrible."  Certainly  not, 
if  Milton  so  accented  it,  any  more  than  blasphe 
mous  and  twenty  more  which  sound  oddly  to  us 
now.  However  that  may  be,  Milton  could  not 


36  MILTON 

have  intended  to  close  not  only  a  period,  but  a 
paragraph  also,  with  an  unmusical  verse,  and  in 
the  only  other  passage  where  the  word  occurs 
it  is  accented  as  now  on  the  first  syllable:  — 

"With  hideous  ruin  and  combustion  down 
To  bottomless  perdition,  there  to  dwell.'* 

As  bottom  is  a  word  which,  like  bosom  and  besom, 
may  be  monosyllabic  or  dissyllabic  according 
to  circumstances,  I  am  persuaded  that  the  last 
passage  quoted  (and  all  three  refer  to  the  same 
event)  gives  us  the  word  wanting  in  the  two 
others,  and  that  Milton  wrote,  or  meant  to 
write, 

"  Burnt  after  them  down  to  the  bottomless  pit," 

which  leaves  in  the  verse  precisely  the  kind  of 
ripple  that  Milton  liked  best.1 

Much  of  what  Mr.  Masson  says  in  his  Intro 
duction  of  the  way  in  which  the  verses  of  Mil 
ton  should  be  read  is  judicious  enough,  though 
some  of  the  examples  he  gives,  of  the  "com 
icality  J>  which  would  ensue  from  compressing 
every  verse  into  an  exact  measure  often  sylla 
bles,  are  based  on  a  surprising  ignorance  of  the 

1  Milton,  however,  would  not  have  balked  at  //;'  bottom 
less  any  more  than  Drayton  at  ///'  rejected  or  Donne  at  M* 
sea.  Mr.  Masson  does  not  seem  to  understand  this  elision,  for 
he  corrects  /'  //;'  midst  to  /'  the  midst,  and  takes  pains  to  men 
tion  it  in  a  note.  He  might  better  have  restored  the  n  in  /', 
where  it  is  no  contraction,  but  merely  indicates  the  pronunci 
ation,  as  0*  for 
v 


MILTON  37 

laws  which  guided  our  poets  just  before  and 
during  Milton's  time  in  the  structure  of  their 
verses.  Thus  he  seems  to  think  that  a  strict 
scansion  would  require  us  in  the  verses 

"  So  he  with  difficulty  and  labor  hard," 

and 

"  Carnation,  purple,  azure,  or  specked  with  gold  " 

to  pronounce  diffikty  and  purpJ.  Though  Mr. 
Masson  talks  of  "  slurs  and  elisions,"  his  ear 
would  seem  somewhat  insensible  to  their  exact 
nature  or  office.  His  diffikty  supposes  a  hiatus 
where  none  is  intended,  and  his  making  purple 
of  one  syllable  wrecks  the  whole  verse,  the  real 
slur  in  the  latter  case  being  on  azure  or.1  When 
he  asks  whether  Milton  required  "  these  pro 
nunciations  in  his  verse,''  no  positive  answer 
can  be  given,  but  I  very  much  doubt  whether 
he  would  have  thought  that  some  of  the  lines 
Mr.  Masson  cites  "remain  perfectly  good  Blank 
Verse  even  with  the  most  leisurely  natural  enun 
ciation  of  the  spare  syllable,"  and  I  am  sure  he 
would  have  stared  if  told  that  "the  number  of 
accents  "  in  a  pentameter  verse  was  "  variable." 
It  may  be  doubted  whether  elisions  and  com 
pressions  which  would  be  thought  in  bad  taste 
or  even  vulgar  now  were  more  abhorrent  to  the 
ears  of  Milton's  generation  than  to  a  cultivated 

1  Exactly  analogous  to  that  in  treasurer  when  it  is  shortened 
to  two  syllables. 


38  MILTON 

Italian  would  be  the  hearing  Dante  read  as  prose. 
After  all,  what  Mr.  Masson  says  may  be  reduced 
to  the  infallible  axiom  that  poetry  should  be  read 
as  poetry. 

Mr.  Masson  seems  to  be  right  in  his  main 
principles,  but  the  examples  he  quotes  make 
one  doubt  whether  he  knows  what  a  verse  is. 
For  example,  he  thinks  it  would  be  a  "  horror," 
if  in  the  verse 

"That  invincible  Samson  far  renowned,*' 

we  should  lay  the  stress  on  the  first  syllable  of 
invincible.  It  is  hard  to  see  why  this  should 
be  worse  than  conventicle  or  remonstrance  or  sue- 
cessor  or  incompatible  (the  three  latter  used  by  the 
correct  Daniel),  or  why  Mr.  Masson  should 
clap  an  accent  on  surface  merely  because  it 
comes  at  the  end  of  a  verse,  and  deny  it  to  in 
vincible.  If  one  read  the  verse  just  cited  with 
those  that  go  with  it,  he  will  find  that  the  accent 
must  come  on  the  first  syllable  of  invincible,  or 
else  the  whole  passage  becomes  chaos.1  Should 
we  refuse  to  say  obleeged  with  Pope  because  the 
fashion  has  changed  ?  From  its  apparently 
greater  freedom  in  skilful  hands,  blank  verse 

1  Milton  himself  has  invisible,  for  we  cannot  suppose  him 
guilty  of  a  verse  like 

"  Shoots  invisible  virtue  even  to  the  deep," 

while,  if  read  rightly,  it  has  just  one  of  those  sweeping  elisions 
that  he  loved. 


MILTON  39 

gives  more  scope  to  sciolistic  theorizing  and 
dogmatism  than  the  rhyming  pentameter  coup 
let,  but  it  is  safe  to  say  that  no  verse  is  good  in 
the  one  that  would  not  be  good  in  the  other 
when  handled  by  a  master  like  Dryden.  Mil 
ton,  like  other  great  poets,  wrote  some  bad 
verses,  and  it  is  wiser  to  confess  that  they  are  so 
than  to  conjure  up  some  unimaginable  reason 
why  the  reader  should  accept  them  as  the  better 
for  their  badness.  Such  a  bad  verse  is 

**  Rocks,  caves,  lakes,  fens,  bogs,  dens  and  shapes  of  death," 

which  might  be  cited  to  illustrate  Pope's 

"  And  ten  low  words  oft  creep  in  one  dull  line." 

Milton  cannot  certainly  be  taxed  with  any 
partiality  for  low  words.  He  rather  loved  them 
tall,  as  the  Prussian  King  loved  men  to  be  six 
feet  high  in  their  stockings,  and  fit  to  go  into 
the  grenadiers.  He  loved  them  as  much  for 
their  music  as  for  their  meaning,  —  perhaps 
more.  His  style,  therefore,  when  it  has  to  deal 
with  commoner  things,  is  apt  to  grow  a  little 
cumbrous  and  unwieldy.  A  Persian  poet  says 
that  when  the  owl  would  boast,  he  boasts  of 
catching  mice  at  the  edge  of  a  hole.  Shake 
speare  would  have  understood  this.  Milton 
would  have  made  him  talk  like  an  eagle.  His 
influence  is  not  to  be  left  out  of  account  as  par 
tially  contributing  to  that  decline  toward  poetic 
diction  which  was  already  beginning  ere  he  died. 


40  MILTON 

If  it  would  not  be  fair  to  say  that  he  is  the  most 
artistic,  he  may  be  called  in  the  highest  sense 
the  most  scientific  of  our  poets.  If  to  Spenser 
younger  poets  have  gone  to  be  sung  to,  they 
have  sat  at  the  feet  of  Milton  to  be  taught. 
Our  language  has  no  finer  poem  than  "Samson 
Agonistes,"  if  any  so  fine  in  the  quality  of  au 
stere  dignity  or  in  the  skill  with  which  the  poet's 
personal  experience  is  generalized  into  a  classic 
tragedy. 

Gentle  as  Milton's  earlier  portraits  would 
seem  to  show  him,  he  had  in  him  by  nature,  or 
bred  into  him  by  fate,  something  of  the  haughty 
and  defiant  self-assertion  of  Dante  and  Michael 
Angelo.  In  no  other  English  author  is  the  man 
so  large  a  part  of  his  works.  Milton's  haughty 
conception  of  himself  enters  into  all  he  says 
and  does.  Always  the  necessity  of  this  one  man 
became  that  of  the  whole  human  race  for  the 
moment.  There  were  no  walls  so  sacred  but 
must  go  to  the  ground  when  he  wanted  elbow- 
room;  and  he  wanted  a  great  deal.  Did  Mary 
Powell,  the  cavalier's  daughter,  find  the  abode  of 
a  roundhead  schoolmaster  incompatible  and  leave 
it,  forthwith  the  cry  of  the  universe  was  for  an 
easier  dissolution  of  the  marriage  covenant.  If 
he  is  blind,  it  is  with  excess  of  light,  it  is  a 
divine  partiality,  an  overshadowing  with  angels' 
wings.  Phineus  and  Teiresias  are  admitted 
among  the  prophets  because  they,  too,  had  lost 


MILTON  41 

their  sight,  and  the  blindness  of  Homer  is  of 
more  account  than  his  "  Iliad."  After  writing  in 
rhyme  till  he  was  past  fifty,  he  finds  it  unsuit 
able  for  his  epic,  and  it  at  once  becomes  "  the 
invention  of  a  barbarous  age. to  set  off  wretched 
matter  and  lame  metre."  If  the  structure  of  his 
mind  be  undramatic,  why,  then,  the  English 
drama  is  naught,  learned  Jonson,  sweetest  Shake 
speare,  and  the  rest  notwithstanding,  and  he  will 
compose  a  tragedy  on  a  Greek  model  with  the 
blinded  Samson  for  its  hero,  and  he  will  com 
pose  it  partly  in  rhyme.  Plainly  he  belongs  to 
the  intenser  kind  of  men  whose  yesterdays  are 
in  no  way  responsible  for  their  to-morrows.  And 
this  makes  him  perennially  interesting  even  to 
those  who  hate  his  politics,  despise  his  Socinian- 
ism,  and  find  his  greatest  poem  a  bore.  A  new 
edition  of  his  poems  is  always  welcome,  for,  as 
he  is  really  great,  he  presents  a  fresh  side  to  each 
new  student,  and  Mr.  Masson,  in  his  three 
handsome  volumes,  has  given  us,  with  much 
that  is  superfluous  and  even  erroneous,  much 
more  that  is  a  solid  and  permanent  acquisition 
to  our  knowledge. 

It  results  from  the  almost  scornful  withdrawal 
of  Milton  into  the  fortress  of  his  absolute  per 
sonality  that  no  great  poet  is  so  uniformly  self- 
conscious  as  he.  We  should  say  of  Shakespeare 
that  he  had  the  power  of  transforming  himself 
into  everything  ;  of  Milton,  that  he  had  that  of 


42  MILTON 

transforming  everything  into  himself.  Dante  is 
individual  rather  than  self-conscious,  and  he,  the 
cast-iron  man,  grows  pliable  as  a  field  of  grain  at 
the  breath  of  Beatrice,  and  flows  away  in  waves 
of  sunshine.  But  Milton  never  lets  himself  go 
for  a  moment.  As  other  poets  are  possessed  by 
their  theme,  so  is  he  j^-possessed,  his  great 
theme  being  John  Milton,  and  his  great  duty 
that  of  interpreter  between  him  and  the  world. 
I  say  it  with  all  respect,  for  he  was  well  worthy 
translation,  and  it  is  out  of  Hebrew  that  the 
version  is  made.  Pope  says  he  makes  God 
the  Father  reason  "  like  a  school-divine."  The 
criticism  is  witty,  but  inaccurate.  He  makes 
Deity  a  mouthpiece  for  his  present  theology,  and 
had  the  poem  been  written  a  few  years  later,  the 
Almighty  would  have  become  more  heterodox. 
Since  Dante,  no  one  had  stood  on  these  visiting 
terms  with  heaven. 

Now  it  is  precisely  this  audacity  of  self-reli 
ance,  I  suspect,  which  goes  far  toward  making 
the  sublime,  and  which,  falling  by  a  hair's- 
breadth  short  thereof,  makes  the  ridiculous. 
Puritanism  showed  both  the  strength  and  weak 
ness  of  its  prophetic  nurture  ;  enough  of  the 
latter  to  be  scoffed  out  of  England  by  the  very 
men  it  had  conquered  in  the  field,  enough  of 
the  former  to  intrench  itself  in  three  or  four  im 
mortal  memories.  It  has  left  an  abiding  mark 
in  politics  and  religion,  but  its  great  monuments 


MILTON  43 

are  the  prose  of  Bunyan  and  the  verse  of  Mil 
ton.  It  is  a  high  inspiration  to  be  the  neighbor 
of  great  events  ;  to  have  been  a  partaker  in  them, 
and  to  have  seen  noble  purposes  by  their  own 
self-confidence  become  the  very  means  of  igno 
ble  ends,  if  it  do  not  wholly  repress,  may  kindle 
a  passion  of  regret,  deepening  the  song  which 
dares  not  tell  the  reason  of  its  sorrow.  The  grand 
loneliness  of  Milton  in  his  latter  years,  while  it 
makes  him  the  most  impressive  figure  in  our 
literary  history,  is  reflected  also  in  his  maturer 
poems  by  a  sublime  independence  of  human 
sympathy  like  that  with  which  mountains  fasci 
nate  and  rebuff  us.  But  it  is  idle  to  talk  of  the 
loneliness  of  one  the  habitual  companions  of 
whose  mind  were  the  Past  and  Future.  I  always 
seem  to  see  him  leaning  in  his  blindness  a  hand 
on  the  shoulder  of  each,  sure  that  the  one  will 
guard  the  song  which  the  other  had  inspired. 


DRYDEN1 

1868 

BENVENUTO  CELLINI  tells  us  that 
when,  in  his  boyhood,  he  saw  a  salaman 
der  come  out  of  the  fire,  his  grandfather 
forthwith  gave  him  a  sound  beating,  that  he 
might  the  better  remember  so  unique  a  prodigy. 
Though  perhaps  in  this  case  the  rod  had 
another  application  than  the  autobiographer 
chooses  to  disclose,  and  was  intended  to  fix  in 
the  pupil's  mind  a  lesson  of  veracity  rather  than 
of  science,  the  testimony  to  its  mnemonic  virtue 
remains.  Nay,  so  universally  was  it  once  be 
lieved  that  the  senses,  and  through  them  the 
faculties  of  observation  and  retention,  were  quick- 

1  The  Drctmatick  Works  of  John  Dryden,  Esq.  In  six 
volumes.  London:  Printed  for  Jacob  Tonson,  in  the  Strand. 
MDCCXXXV.  i8mo. 

The  Critical  and  Miscellaneous  Prose-  Works  of  John  Dry- 
den,  now  first  collected.  With  Notes  and  Illustrations.  An 
Account  of  the  Life  and  W-itings  of  the  Author,  grounded  on 
Original  and  Authentick  Documents;  and  a  Collection  of  his 
Letters,  the  greatest  Part  of  which  has  never  before  been  pub 
lished.  By  Edmund  Malone,  Esq.  London:  T.  Cadell  anc 
W.  Davies,  in  the  Strand.  4  vols.  8vo. 

The  Poetical  Works  of  John  Dryden.  (Edited  by  M it- 
ford.)  London:  W.  Pickering.  1832.  5  vols.  l8mo. 


DRYDEN  45 

ened  by  an  irritation  of  the  cuticle,  that  in  France 
it  was  customary  to  whip  the  children  annually 
at  the  boundaries  of  the  parish,  lest  the  true  place 
of  them  might  ever  be  lost  through  neglect  of 
so  inexpensive  a  mordant  for  the  memory.  From 
this  practice  the  older  school  of  critics  should 
seem  to  have  taken  a  hint  for  keeping  fixed  the 
limits  of  good  taste,  and  what  was  somewhat 
vaguely  called  classical  English.  To  mark  these 
limits  in  poetry,  they  set  up  as  Hermas  the  im 
ages  they  had  made  to  them  of  Dry  den,  of  Pope, 
and  later  of  Goldsmith.  Here  they  solemnly 
castigated  every  new  aspirant  in  verse,  who  in 
turn  performed  the  same  function  for  the  next 
generation,  thus  helping  to  keep  always  sacred 
and  immovable  the  ne plus  ultra  alike  of  inspira 
tion  and  of  the  vocabulary.  Though  no  two 
natures  were  ever  much  more  unlike  than  those 
of  Dryden  and  Pope,  and  again  of  Pope  and 
Goldsmith,  and  no  two  styles,  except  in  such 
externals  as  could  be  easily  caught  and  copied, 
yet  it  was  the  fashion,  down  even  to  the  last 
generation,  to  advise  young  writers  to  form  them 
selves,  as  it  was  called,  on  these  excellent  models. 
Wordsworth  himself  began  in  this  school ;  and 
though  there  were  glimpses,  here  and  there,  of 
a  direct  study  of  Nature,  yet  most  of  the  epithets 
in  his  earlier  pieces  were  of  the  traditional  kind 
so  fatal  to  poetry  during  great  part  of  the  last 
century  ;  and  he  indulged  in  that  alphabetic  per- 


46  DRYDEN 

Bonification  which  enlivens  all  such  words  as 
Hunger,  Solitude,  Freedom,  by  the  easy  magic 
of  an  initial  capital. 

"  Where  the  green  apple  shrivels  on  the  spray, 

And  pines  the  unripened  pear  in  summer's  kindliest  ray, 

Even  here  Content  has  fixed  her  smiling  reign 

With  Independence,  child  of  high  Disdain. 

Exulting  'mid  the  winter  of  the  skies, 

Shy  as  the  jealous  chamois,  Freedom  flies, 

And  often  grasps  her  sword,  and  often  eyes." 

Here  we  have  every  characteristic  of  the  artifi 
cial  method  (if  we  except  the  unconscious  alex 
andrine  in  the  second  line),  even  to  the  triplet, 
which  Swift  hated  so  heartily  as  "  a  vicious  way 
of  rhyming  wherewith  Mr.  Drydeii  abounded, 
imitated  by  all  the  bad  versifiers  of  Charles  the 
Second's  reign."  Wordsworth  became,  indeed, 
very  early  the  leader  of  reform  ;  but,  like  Wes 
ley,  he  endeavored  a  reform  within  the  Establish 
ment.  Purifying  the  substance,  he  retained  the 
outward  forms  with  a  feeling  rather  than  convic 
tion  that,  in  poetry,  substance  and  form  are  but 
manifestations  of  the  same  inward  life,  the  one 
fused  into  the  other  in  the  vivid  heat  of  their 
common  expression.  Wordsworth  could  never 
wholly  shake  off  the  influence  of  the  century 
into  which  he  was  born.  He  began  by  propos 
ing  a  reform  of  the  ritual,  but  it  went  no  further 
than  an  attempt  to  get  rid  of  the  words  of  Latin 
original  where  the  meaning  was  as  well  or  better 


DRYDEN  47 

given  in  derivatives  of  the  Saxon.  He  would 
have  stricken  out  the  "  assemble  "  and  left  the 
"  meet  together.'*  Like  Wesley,  he  might  be 
compelled  by  necessity  to  a  breach  of  the  canon  ; 
but,  like  him,  he  was  never  a  willing  schismatic, 
and  his  singing-robes  were  the  full  and  flowing 
canonicals  of  the  church  by  law  established.  In 
spiration  makes  short  work  with  the  usage  of 
the  best  authors  and  with  the  ready-made  ele 
gances  of  diction  ;  but  where  Wordsworth  is  not 
possessed  by  his  demon,  as  Moliere  said  of  Cor- 
neille,  he  equals  Thomson  in  verbiage,  out-Mil- 
tons  Milton  in  artifice  of  style,  and  Latinizes 
his  diction  beyond  Dryden.  The  fact  was,  that 
he  took  up  his  early  opinions  on  instinct,  and 
insensibly  modified  them  as  he  studied  the  mas 
ters  of  what  may  be  called  the  Middle  Period 
of  English  verse.1  As  a  young  man,  he  dispar 
aged  Virgil  ("  We  talked  a  great  deal  of  non 
sense  in  those  days,"  he  said  when  taken  to  task 
for  it  later  in  life) ;  at  fifty-nine  he  translated 
three  books  of  the  .^Eneid,  in  emulation  of  Dry- 
den,  though  falling  far  short  of  him  in  everything 
but  closeness,  as  he  seems,  after  a  few  years,  to 
have  been  convinced.  Keats  was  the  first  reso 
lute  and  wilful  heretic,  the  true  founder  of  the 
modern  school,  which  admits  no  cis-Elizabethan 

1  His  Character  of  a  Happy  Warrior  (1806),  one  of  his 
noblest  poems,  has  a  dash  of  Dryden  in  it,  — still  more  his 
Epittle  to  Sir  George  Beaumont  (1811). 


48  DRYDEN 

authority  save  Milton,  whose  own  English  was 
formed  upon  those  earlier  models.  Keats  de 
nounced  the  authors  of  that  style  which  came 
in  toward  the  close  of  the  seventeenth  century, 
and  reigned  absolute  through  the  whole  of  the 
eighteenth,  as 

"  A  schism, 

Nurtured  by  foppery  and  barbarism, 

who  went  about 

Holding  a  poor  decrepit  standard  out, 

Marked  with  most  flimsy  mottoes,  and  in  large 

The  name  of  one  Boileau!  " 

But  Keats  had  never  then '  studied  the  writers 
of  whom  he  speaks  so  contemptuously,  though 
he  might  have  profited  by  so  doing.  Boileau 
would  at  least  have  taught  him  that^/wjry  would 
have  been  an  apter  epithet  for  the  standard  than 
for  the  mottoes  upon  it.  Dryden  was  the  author 
of  that  schism  against  which  Keats  so  vehe 
mently  asserts  the  claim  of  the  orthodox  teach 
ing  it  had  displaced.  He  was  far  more  just  to 
Boileau,  of  whom  Keats  had  probably  never  read 
a  word.  "  If  I  would  only  cross  the  seas,0  he 
says,  "  I  might  find  in  France  a  living  Horace 
and  a  Juvenal  in  the  person  of  the  admirable 
Boileau,  whose  numbers  are  excellent,  whose 
expressions  are  noble,  whose  thoughts  are  just, 
whose  language  is  pure,  whose  satire  is  pointed, 
and  whose  sense  is  just.  What  he  borrows  from 
1  He  studied  Dryden's  versification  before  writing  his 
Lamia. 


DRYDEN  49 

the  ancients  he  repays  with  usury  of  his  own, 
in  coin  as  good  and  almost  as  universally  valu 
able."  ' 

Dryden  has  now  been  in  his  grave  nearly  a 
hundred  and  seventy  years  ;  in  the  second  class 
of  English  poets  perhaps  no  one  stands,  on  the 
whole,  so  high  as  he;  during  his  lifetime,  in 
spite  of  jealousy,  detraction,  unpopular  politics, 
and  a  suspicious  change  of  faith,  his  preemi 
nence  was  conceded ;  he  was  the  earliest  com 
plete  type  of  the  purely  literary  man,  in  the 
modern  sense;  there  is  a  singular  unanimity  in 
allowing  him  a  certain  claim  to  greatness  which 
would  be  denied  to  men  as  famous  and  more 
read,  —  to  Pope  or  Swift,  for  example;  he  is 
supposed,  in  some  way  or  other,  to  have  re 
formed  English  poetry.  It  is  now  about  half 
a  century  since  the  only  uniform  edition  of  his 
works  was  edited  by  Scott.  No  library  is  com 
plete  without  him,  no  name  is  more  familiar 
than  his,  and  yet  it  may  be  suspected  that  few 
writers  are  more  thoroughly  buried  in  that  great 
cemetery  of  the  <c  British  Poets."  If  contempo 
rary  reputation  be  often  deceitful,  posthumous 
fame  may  be  generally  trusted,  for  it  is  a  verdict 
made  up  of  the  suffrages  of  the  select  men  in 
succeeding  generations.  This  verdict  has  been 
as  good  as  unanimous  in  favor  of  Dryden.  It 

1  On  the  Origin  and  Progress  of  Satire.  See  Johnson's 
counter-opinion  in  his  life  of  Dryden. 


5°  DRYDEN 

is,  perhaps,  worth  while  to  take  a  fresh  observa 
tion  of  him,  to  consider  him  neither  as  warning 
nor  example,  but  to  endeavor  to  make  out  what 
it  is  that  has  given  so  lofty  and  firm  a  position 
to  one  of  the  most  unequal,  inconsistent,  and 
faulty  writers  that  ever  lived.  He  is  a  curious 
example  of  what  we  often  remark  of  the  living, 
but  rarely  of  the  dead,  —  that  they  get  credit 
for  what  they  might  be  quite  as  much  as  for 
what  they  are,  —  and  posterity  has  applied  to 
him  one  of  his  own  rules  of  criticism,  judging 
him  by  the  best  rather  than  the  average  of  his 
achievement,  a  thing  posterity  is  seldom  wont 
to  do.  On  the  losing  side  in  politics,  it  is  true 
of  his  polemical  writings  as  of  Burke's,  —  whom 
in  many  respects  he  resembles,  and  especially 
in  that  supreme  quality  of  a  reasoner,  that  his 
mind  gathers  not  only  heat,  but  clearness  and 
expansion,  by  its  own  motion,  —  that  they  have 
Won  his  battle  for  him  in  the  judgment  of  after 
times. 

To  me,  looking  back  at  him,  he  gradually 
becomes  a  singularly  interesting  and  even  pic 
turesque  figure.  He  is,  in  more  senses  than 
one,  in  language,  in  turn  of  thought,  in  style 
of  mind,  in  the  direction  of  his  activity,  the  first 
of  the  moderns.  He  is  the  first  literary  man 
who  was  also  a  man  of  the  world,  as  we  under 
stand  the  term.  He  succeeded  Ben  Jonson  as 
the  acknowledged  dictator  of  wit  and  criticism, 


DRYDEN  51 

as  Dr.  Johnson,  after  nearly  the  same  interval, 
succeeded  him.  All  ages  are,  in  some  sense, 
ages  of  transition  ;  but  there  are  times  when 
the  transition  is  more  marked,  more  rapid ;  and 
it  is,  perhaps,  an  ill  fortune  for  a  man  of  letters 
to  arrive  at  maturity  during  such  a  period,  still 
more  to  represent  in  himself  the  change  that  is 
going  on,  and  to  be  an  efficient  cause  in  bring 
ing  it  about.  Unless,  like  Goethe,  he  be  of 
a  singularly  uncontemporaneous  nature,  capable 
of  being  tutta  in  se  romita,  and  of  running 
parallel  with  his  time  rather  than  being  sucked 
into  its  current,  he  will  be  thwarted  in  that  har 
monious  development  of  native  force  which  has 
so  much  to  do  with  its  steady  and  successful 
application.  Dryden  suffered,  no  doubt,  in  this 
way.  Though  in  creed  he  seems  to  have  drifted 
backward  in  an  eddy  of  the  general  current ;  yet 
of  the  intellectual  movement  of  the  time,  so  far 
certainly  as  literature  shared  in  it,  he  could  say, 
with  ^neas,  not  only  that  he  saw,  but  that  him 
self  was  a  great  part  of  it.  That  movement  was, 
on  the  whole,  a  downward  one,  from  faith  to 
scepticism,  from  enthusiasm  to  cynicism,  from 
the  imagination  to  the  understanding.  It  was 
in  a  direction  altogether  away  from  those  springs 
of  imagination  and  faith  at  which  they  of  the 
last  age  had  slaked  the  thirst  or  renewed  the 
vigor  of  their  souls.  Dryden  himself  recognized 
that  indefinable  and  gregarious  influence  which 


52  DRYDEN 

we  call  nowadays  the  Spirit  of  the  Age,  when 
he  said  that  "  every  Age  has  a  kind  of  universal 
Genius."  He  had  also  a  just  notion  of  that  in 
which  he  lived  ;  for  he  remarks,  incidentally, 
that  "  all  knowing  ages  are  naturally  sceptic  and 
'  not  at  all  bigoted,  which,  if  I  am  not  much  de 
ceived,  is  the  proper  character  of  our  own."  2 
It  may  be  conceived  that  he  was  even  painfully 
half  aware  of  having  fallen  upon  a  time  incap 
able,  not  merely  of  a  great  poet,  but  perhaps  of 
any  poet  at  all  ;  for  nothing  is  so  sensitive 
to  the  chill  of  a  sceptical  atmosphere  as  that 
/  enthusiasm  which,  if  it  be  not  genius,  is  at  least 
t  the  beautiful  illusion  that  saves  it  from  the  baf 
fling  quibbles  of  self-consciousness.  Thrice  un 
happy  he  who,  born  to  see  things  as  they  might 
be,  is  schooled  by  circumstances  to  see  them  as 
people  say  they  are,  —  to  read  God  in  a  prose 
translation.  Such  was  Dryden's  lot,  and  such, 
for  a  good  part  of  his  days,  it  was  by  his  own 
choice.  He  who  was  of  a  stature  to  snatch  the 
torch  of  life  that  flashes  from  lifted  hand  to 
hand  along  the  generations,  over  the  heads 
of  inferior  men,  chose  rather  to  be  a  link-boy 
to  the  stews. 

As  a  writer  for  the  stage,  he  deliberately 
adopted  and  repeatedly  reaffirmed  the  maxim 
that 

"  He  who  lives  to  please,  must  please  to  live." 

1  Essay  on  Dramatick  Poesy.  *  Life  of  Lucian. 


DRYDEN  53 

Without  earnest  convictions,  no  great  or  sound 
literature  is  conceivable.  But  if  Dryden  mostly 
wanted  that  inspiration  which  comes  of  belief 
in  and  devotion  to  something  nobler  and  more 
abiding  than  the  present  moment  and  its  petu 
lant  need,  he  had,  at  least,  the  next  best  thing 
to  that,  —  a  thorough  faith  in  himself.  He  was, 
moreover,  a  man  of  singularly  open  soul,  and 
of  a  temper  self-confident  enough  to  be  candid 
even  with  himself.  His  mind  was  growing  to 
the  last,  his  judgment  widening  and  deepening, 
his  artistic  sense  refining  itself  more  and  more. 
He  confessed  his  errors,  and  was  not  ashamed 
to  retrace  his  steps  in  search  of  that  better  know 
ledge  which  the  omniscience  of  superficial  study 
had  disparaged.  Surely  an  intellect  that  is  still 
pliable  at  seventy  is  a  phenomenon  as  interesting 
as  it  is  rare.  But  at  whatever  period  of  his  life  we 
look  at  Dryden,  and  whatever,  for  the  moment, 
may  have  been  his  poetic  creed,  there  was  some 
thing  in  the  nature  of  the  man  that  would  not 
be  wholly  subdued  to  what  it  worked  in.  There 
are  continual  glimpses  of  something  in  him 
greater  than  he,  hints  of  possibilities  finer  than 
anything  he  has  done.  You  feel  that  the  whole 
of  him  was  better  than  any  random  specimens, 
though  of  his  best,  seem  to  prove.  Incessupatety 
he  has  by  times  the  large  stride  of  the  elder  race, 
though  it  sinks  too  often  into  the  slouch  of  a 
man  who  has  seen  better  days.  His  grand  air 


54  DRYDEN 

may,  in  part,  spring  from  a  habit  of  easy  superi 
ority  to  his  competitors;  but  must  also,  in  part, 
be  ascribed  to  an  innate  dignity  of  character. 
That  this  preeminence  should  have  been  so 
generally  admitted,  during  his  life,  can  only  be 
explained  by  a  bottom  of  good  sense,  kindliness, 
and  sound  judgment,  whose  solid  worth  could 
afford  that  many  a  flurry  of  vanity,  petulance, 
and  even  error  should  flit  across  the  surface  and 
be  forgotten.  Whatever  else  Dryden  may  have 
been,  the  last  and  abiding  impression  of  him 
is,  that  he  was  thoroughly  manly ;  and  while  it 
may  be  disputed  whether  he  were  a  great  poet, 
it  may  be  said  of  him,  as  Wordsworth  said  of 
Burke,  that  "  he  was  by  far  the  greatest  man 
of  his  age,  not  only  abounding  in  knowledge 
himself,  but  feeding,  in  various  directions,  his 
most  able  contemporaries."  ' 

Dryden  was  born  in  1631.  He  was  accord 
ingly  six  years  old  when  Jonson  died,  was 
nearly  a  quarter  of  a  century  younger  than  Mil 
ton,  and  may  have  personally  known  Bishop 
Hall,  the  first  English  satirist,  who  was  living 
till  1656.  On  the  other  side,  he  was  older  than 
Swift  by  thirty-six,  than  Addison  by  forty-one, 
and  than  Pope  by  fifty-seven  years.  Dennis 
says  that  "  Dryden,  for  the  last  ten  years  of  his 

1  "The  great  man  must  have  that  intellect  which  puts  in 
motion  the  intellect  of  others."  (Landor,  Imaginary  Con 
versations,  Diogenes  and  Plato.) 


DRYDEN  55 

life,  was  much  acquainted  with  Addison,  and 
drank  with  him  more  than  he  ever  used  to  do, 
probably  so  far  as  to  hasten  his  end,"  being 
commonly  "  an  extreme  sober  man."  Pope  tells 
us  that,  in  his  twelfth  year,  he  £C  saw  Dryden," 
perhaps  at  Will's,  perhaps  in  the  street,  as  Scott 
did  Burns.  Dryden  himself  visited  Milton  now 
and  then,  and  was  intimate  with  Davenant,  who 
could  tell  him  of  Fletcher  and  Jonson  from  per 
sonal  recollection.  Thus  he  stands  between  the 
age  before  and  that  which  followed  him,  giving  a 
hand  to  each.  His  father  was  a  country  clergy 
man,  of  Puritan  leanings,  a  younger  son  of  an  an 
cient  county  family.  The  Puritanism  is  thought 
to  have  come  in  with  the  poet's  great-grandfather, 
who  made  in  hiswill  the  somewhat  singular  state 
ment  that  he  was  "assured  by  the  Holy  Ghost 
that  he  was  elect  of  God."  It  would  appear  from 
this  that  Dryden's  self-confidence  was  an  inher 
itance.  The  solid  quality  of  his  mind  showed 
itself  early.  He  himself  tells  us  that  he  had  read 
Polybius  "  in  English,  with  the  pleasure  of  a 
boy,  before  he  was  ten  years  of  age,  and  yet 
even  then  had  some  dark  notions  of  the  'prudence 
with  which  he  conducted  his  design."  l  The  con 
cluding  words  are  very  characteristic,  even  if 
Dryden,  as  men  commonly  do,  interpreted  his 
boyish  turn  of  mind  by  later  self-knowledge. 
We  thus  get  a  glimpse  of  him  browsing  —  for, 
1  Character  of  Polybius  (1692). 


56  DRYDEN 

like  Johnson,  Burke, and  the  full  as  distinguished 
from  the  learned  men,  he  was  always  a  random 
reader  '  --  in  his  father's  library,  and  painfully 
culling  here  and  there  a  spray  of  his  own  proper 
nutriment  from  among  the  stubs  and  thorns  of 
Puritan  divinity.  After  such  schooling  as  could 
be  had  in  the  country,  he  was  sent  up  to  West 
minster  School,  then  under  the  headship  of  the 
celebrated  Dr.  Busby.  Here  he  made  his  first 
essays  in  verse,  translating,  among  other  school 
exercises  of  the  same  kind,  the  third  satire  of 
Persius.  In  1650  he  was  entered  at  Trinity  Col 
lege,  Cambridge,  and  remained  there  for  seven 
years.  The  only  record  of  his  college  life  is  a 
discipline  imposed,  in  1652,  for  "disobedience 
to  the  Vice- Master,  and  contumacy  in  taking 
his  punishment,  inflicted  by  him."  Whether 
this  punishment  was  corporeal,  as  Johnson  in 
sinuates  in  the  similar  case  of  Milton,  we  are 
ignorant.  He  certainly  retained  no  very  fond 
recollection  of  his  Alma  Mater,  for  in  his  "Pro 
logue  to  the  University  of  Oxford  "  he  says: — 

"  Oxford  to  him  a  dearer  name  shall  be 
Than  his  own  mother  university; 
Thebes  did  his  green,  unknowing  youth  engage, 
He  chooses  Athens  in  his  riper  age." 

By  the  death  of  his  father,  in    1654,  he  came 

1  •«  For  my  own  part,  who  must  confess  it  to  my  shame 
that  I  never  read  anything  but  for  pleasure."  (L/ft  of  Plu 
tarch,  1683.) 


DRYDEN  57 

into  possession  of  a  small  estate  of  sixty  pounds 
a  year,  from  which,  however,  a  third  must  be 
deducted,  for  his  mother's  dower,  till  1676. 
After  leaving  Cambridge,  he  became  secretary 
to  his  near  relative,  Sir  Gilbert  Pickering,  at 
that  time  Cromwell's  chamberlain,  and  a  mem 
ber  of  his  Upper  House.  In  1670  he  succeeded 
Davenant  as  Poet  Laureate,1  and  Howell  as 
Historiographer,  with  a  yearly  salary  of  two 
hundred  pounds.  This  place  he  lost  at  the  Re 
volution,  and  had  the  mortification  to  see  his  old 
enemy  and  butt,  Shadwell,  promoted  to  it,  as 
the  best  poet  the  Whig  party  could  muster.  If 
William  was  obliged  to  read  the  verses  of  his 
official  minstrel,  Dryden  was  more  than  avenged. 
From  1 68*8  to  his  death,  twelve  years  later,  he 
earned  his  bread  manfully  by  his  pen,  without 
any  mean  complaining,  and  with  no  allusion  to 
his  fallen  fortunes  that  is  not  dignified  and 
touching.  These  latter  years,  during  which  he 
was  his  own  man  again,  were  probably  the  hap 
piest  of  his  life.  In  1664  or  1665  he  married 
Lady  Elizabeth  Howard,  daughter  of  the  Earl 
of  Berkshire.  About  a  hundred  pounds  a  year 
were  thus  added  to  his  income.  The  marriage 
is  said  not  to  have  been  a  happy  one,  and  per- 

1  Gray  says  petulantly  enough  that  "  Dryden  wa?  as  dis 
graceful  to  the  office,  from  his  character,  as  the  poorest 
scribbler  could  have  been  from  his  verses. ' '  (Gray  to  Mason, 
1 9th  December,  1757.) 


58  DRYDEN 

haps  it  was  not,  for  his  wife  was  apparently  a 
weak-minded  woman  ;  but  the  inference  from 
the  internal  evidence  of  Dryden's  plays,  as  of 
Shakespeare's,  is  very  untrustworthy,  ridicule 
of  marriage  having  always  been  a  common  stock 
in  trade  of  the  comic  writers. 

The  earliest  of  his  verses  that  have  come 
down  to  us  were  written  upon  the  death  ot 
Lord  Hastings,  and  are  as  bad  as  they  can  be, 
—  a  kind  of  parody  on  the  worst  of  Donne. 
They  have  every  fault  of  his  manner,  without 
a  hint  of  the  subtle  and  often  profound  thought 
that  more  than  redeems  it.  As  the  Doctor  him 
self  would  have  said,  here  is  Donne  outdone. 
The  young  nobleman  died  of  the  small-pox, 
and  Dryden  exclaims  with  truly  comic' pathos, — 

"  Was  there  no  milder  way  than  the  small-pox, 
The  very  filthiness  of  Pandora's  box  ?  " 

He    compares    the    pustules    to    "  rosebuds 
stuck  i'  the  lily  skin  about,"  and  says  that 

•«  Each  little  pimple  had  a  tear  in  it 

To  wail  the  fault  its  rising  did  commit." 

But  he  has  not  done  his  worst  yet,  by  a  great 
deal.    What  follows  is  even  finer  :  — 

"  No  comet  need  foretell  his  change  drew  on, 
Whose  corpse  might  seem  a  constellation. 
O,  had  he  died  of  old,  how  great  a  strife 
Had  been  who  from  his  death  should  draw  their  life! 
Who  should,  by  one  rich  draught,  become  whate'er 
Seneca,  Cato,  Numa,  Caesar,  were, 
HI 


DRYDEN  59 

Learned,  virtuous,  pious,  great,  and  have  by  this 
An  universal  metempsychosis! 
Must  all  these  aged  sires  in  one  funeral 
Expire  ?  all  die  in  one  so  young,  so  small  ?  " 

It  is  said  that  one  of  Allston's  early  pictures 
was  brought  to  him,  after  he  had  long  forgotten 
it,  and  his  opinion  asked  as  to  the  wisdom  of 
the  young  artist's  persevering  in  the  career  he 
had  chosen.  Allston  advised  his  quitting  it 
forthwith  as  hopeless.  Could  the  same  experi 
ment  have  been  tried  with  these  verses  upon 
Dryden,  can  any  one  doubt  that  his  counsel 
would  have  been  the  same  ?  It  should  be  re 
membered,  however,  that  he  was  barely  turned 
eighteen  when  they  were  written,  and  the  tend 
ency  of  his  style  is  noticeable  in  so  early  an 
abandonment  of  the  participial  ed  in  learned  and 
aged.  In  the  next  year  he  appears  again  in  some 
commendatory  verses  prefixed  to  the  sacred  epi 
grams  of  his  friend,  John  Hoddesdon.  In  these 
he  speaks  of  the  author  as  a 

"  Young  eaglet,  who,  thy  nest  thus  soon  forsook, 
So  lofty  and  divine  a  course  hast  took 
As  all  admire,  before  the  down  begin 
To  peep,  as  yet,  upon  thy  smoother  chin." 

Here  is  almost  every  fault  which  Dryden's 
later  nicety  would  have  condemned.  But  per 
haps  there  is  no  schooling  so  good  for  an  author 
as  his  own  youthful  indiscretions.  Certainly 
there  is  none  so  severe.  After  this  effort  Dry- 


60  DRYDEN 

den  seems  to  have  lain  fallow  for  ten  years,  and 
then  he  at  length  reappears  in  thirty-seven 
"  heroic  stanzas  "  on  the  death  of  Cromwell. 
The  versification  is  smoother,  but  the  conceits 
are  there  again,  though  in  a  milder  form.  The 
verse  is  modelled  after  "  Gondibert."  A  sin 
gle  image  from  Nature  (he  was  almost  always 
happy  in  these)  gives  some  hint  of  the  maturer 
Dry  den :  — 

««  And  wars,  like  mists  that  rise  against  the  sun, 
Made  him  but  greater  seem,  not  greater  grow." 

Two  other  verses  — 

"  And  the  isle,  when  her  protecting  genius  went, 
Upon  his  obsequies  loud  sighs  conferred  " — 

are  interesting,  because  they  show  that  he  had 
been  studying  the  early  poems  of  Milton.  He 
has  contrived  to  bury  under  a  rubbish  of  verbi 
age  one  of  the  most  purely  imaginative  pass 
ages  ever  written  by  the  great  Puritan  poet. 

«'  From  haunted  spring  and  dale, 

Edged  with  poplar  pale, 
The  parting  genius  is  with  sighing  sent.' 

This  is  the  more  curious  because,  twenty-four 
years  afterwards,  he  says,  in  defending  rhyme : 
"  Whatever  causes  he  [Milton]  alleges  for  the 
abolishment  of  rhyme,  his  own  particular  reason 
is  plainly  this,  that  rhyme  was  not  his  talent ; 
he  had  neither  the  ease  of  doing  it  nor  the 
graces  of  it :  which  is  manifest  in  his  '  Juvenilia/ 


DRYDEN  61 

.  .  .  where  his  rhyme  is  always  constrained  and 
forced,  and  comes  hardly  from  him,  at  an  age 
when  the  soul  is  most  pliant,  and  the  passion 
of  love  makes  almost  every  man  a  rhymer, 
though  not  a  poet."1  It  was  this,  no  doubt, 
that  heartened  Dr.  Johnson  to  say  of  "  Lyci- 
das  "  that  "  the  diction  was  harsh,  the  rhymes 
uncertain,  and  the  numbers  unpleasing."  It  is 
Dry  den's  excuse  that  his  characteristic  excellence 
is  to  argue  persuasively  and  powerfully,  whether 
in  verse  or  prose,  and  that  he  was  amply  en 
dowed  with  the  most  needful  quality  of  an 
advocate, —  to  be  always  strongly  and  wholly  of 
his  present  way  of  thinking,  whatever  it  might 
be.  Next  we  have,  in  1660,  "Astraea  Redux" 
on  the  "happy  restoration"  of  Charles  II.  In 
this  also  we  can  forebode  little  of  the  full-grown 
Dryden  but  his  defects.  We  see  his  tendency 
to  exaggeration,  and  to  confound  physical  with 
metaphysical,  as  where  he  says  of  the  ships  that 
brought  home  the  royal  brothers,  that 

"  The  joyful  London  meets 
The  princely  York,  himself  alone  a  freight, 
The  Swiftsure  groans  beneath  great  Gloster's  weight,"  — 

and  speaks  of  the 

"  Repeated  prayer 
Which  stormed  the  skies  and  ravished  Charles  from  thence." 

There  is  also  a  certain  every-dayness,  not  to 

1  Essay  on  the  Origin  and  Progress  of  Satire. 


62  DRYDEN 

say  vulgarity,  of  phrase,  which  Dryden  never 
wholly  refined  away,  and  which  continually 
tempts  us  to  sum  up  at  once  against  him  as  the 
greatest  poet  that  ever  was  or  could  be  made 
wholly  out  of  prose. 

"  Heaven  would  no  bargain  for  its  blessings  drive  " 

is  an  example.  On  the  other  hand,  there  are  a 
few  verses  almost  worthy  of  his  best  days,  as 
these  :  — 

«« Some  lazy  ages  lost  in  sleep  and  ease, 
No  action  leave  to  busy  chronicles; 
Such  whose  supine  felicity  but  makes 
Jn  story  chasms,  in  epochas  mistakes, 
O'er  whom  Time  gently  shakes  his  wings  of  down, 
Till  with  his  silent  sickle  they  are  mown." 

These  are  all  the  more  noteworthy,  that  Dry- 
den,  unless  in  argument,  is  seldom  equal  for 
six  lines  together.  In  the  poem  to  Lord  Clar 
endon  (1662)  there  are  four  verses  that  have 
something  of  the  "energy  divine"  for  which 
Pope  praised  his  master. 

"  Let  envy,  then,  those  crimes  within  you  see 
From  which  the  happy  never  must  be  free; 
Envy  that  does  with  misery  reside, 
The  joy  and  the  revenge  of  ruined  pride." 

In  his  "Aurengzebe  "  (1675) tnere  is  a  pass 
age,  of  which,  as  it  is  a  good  example  of  Dryden, 
I  shall  quote  the  whole,  though  my  purpose 
aim  mainly  at  the  latter  verses  :  — 


DRYDEN  63 

"When  I  consider  life,  't  is  all  a  cheat; 
Yet,  fooled  with  Hope,  men  favor  the  deceit, 
Trust  on,  and  think  to-morrow  will  repay; 
To-morrow  *s  falser  than  the  former  day, 
Lies  worse,  and,  while  it  says  we  shall  be  blest 
With  some  new  joys,  cuts  off  what  we  possest. 
Strange  cozenage  !  none  would  live  past  years  again, 
Yet  all  hope  pleasure  in  what  yet  remain, 
And  from  the  dregs  of  life  think  to  receive 
What  the  first  sprightly  running  could  not  give. 
I  'm  tired  of  waiting  for  this  chymic  gold 
Which  fools  us  young  and  beggars  us  when  old." 

The  "  first  sprightly  running  "  of  Dryden's 
vintage  was,  it  must  be  confessed,  a  little  muddy, 
if  not  beery  ;  but  if  his  own  soil  did  not  produce 
grapes  of  the  choicest  flavor,  he  knew  where  they 
were  to  be  had ;  and  his  product,  like  sound  wine, 
grew  better  the  longer  it  stood  upon  the  lees.  He 
tells  us,  evidently  thinking  of  himself,  that  in 
a  poet,  "  from  fifty  to  threescore,  the  balance 
generally  holds  even  in  our  colder  climates,  for 
he  loses  not  much  in  fancy,  and  judgment,  which 
is  the  effect  of  observation,  still  increases.  His 
succeeding  years  afford  him  little  more  than 
the  stubble  of  his  own  harvest,  yet,  if  his  con 
stitution  be  healthful,  his  mind  may  still  retain 
a  decent  vigor,  and  the  gleanings  of  that  of 
Ephraim,  in  comparison  with  others,  will  sur 
pass  the  vintage  of  Abiezer."  l  Since  Chaucer, 
none  of  our  poets  has  had  a  constitution  more 
1  Dedication  of  the  Georgia. 


64  DRYDEN 

healthful,  and  it  was  his  old  age  that  yielded  the 
best  of  him.  In  him  the  understanding  was, 
perhaps,  in  overplus  for  his  entire  good  fortune 
as  a  poet,  and  that  is  a  faculty  among  the  earliest 
to  mature.  We  have  seen  him,  at  only  ten  years, 
divining  the  power  of  reason  in  Polybius.1  The 
same  turn  of  mind  led  him  later  to  imitate  the 
French  school  of  tragedy,  and  to  admire  in  Ben 
Jonson  the  most  correct  of  English  poets.  It 
was  his  imagination  that  needed  quickening,  and 
it  is  very  curious  to  trace  through  his  different 
prefaces  the  gradual  opening  of  his  eyes  to  the 
causes  of  the  solitary  preeminence  of  Shake 
speare.  At  first  he  is  sensible  of  an  attraction 
towards  him  which  he  cannot  explain,  and  for 
which  he  apologizes,  as  if  it  were  wrong.  But  he 
feels  himself  drawn  more  and  more  strongly,  till 
at  last  he  ceases  to  resist  altogether,  and  is  forced 
to  acknowledge  that  there  is  something  in  this 
one  man  that  is  not  and  never  was  anywhere  else, 
something  not  to  be  reasoned  about,  ineffable, 
divine ;  if  contrary  to  the  rules,  so  much  the 
worse  for  them.  It  may  be  conjectured  that 
Dryden's  Puritan  associations  may  have  stood 
in  the  way  of  his  more  properly  poetic  culture, 
and  that  his  early  knowledge  of  Shakespeare 
was  slight.  He  tells  us  that  Davenant,  whom 

1  Dryden's  penetration  is  always  remarkable.  His  general 
judgment  of  Polybius  coincides  remarkably  with  that  of 
Mommsen.  {Rom.  Gesch.  ii.  448,  seq.) 


DRYDEN  65 

he  could  not  have  known  before  he  himself 
was  twenty-seven,  first  taught  him  to  admire  the 
great  poet.1  But  even  after  his  imagination  had 
become  conscious  of  its  prerogative,  and  his  ex 
pression  had  been  ennobled  by  frequenting  this 
higher  society,  we  find  him  continually  dropping 
back  into  that  sermo  pedestris  which  seems,  on 
the  whole,  to  have  been  his  more  natural  ele 
ment.  We  always  feel  his  epoch  in  him,  and  that 
he  was  the  lock  which  let  our  language  down 
from  its  point  of  highest  poetry  to  its  level  of 
easiest  and  most  gently  flowing  prose.  His 
enthusiasm  needs  the  contagion  of  other  minds 
to  arouse  it ;  but  his  strong  sense,  his  command 
of  the  happy  word,  his  wit,  which  is  distinguished 
by  a  certain  breadth  and,  as  it  were,  power  of 
generalization,  as  Pope's  by  keenness  of  edge 
and  point,  were  his,  whether  he  would  or  no. 
Accordingly,  his  poetry  is  often  best  and  his 
verse  more  flowing  where  (as  in  parts  of  his  ver 
sion  of  the  twenty-ninth  ode  of  the  third  book 
of  Horace)  he  is  amplifying  the  suggestions  of 
another  mind.2  Viewed  from  one  side,  he  justi- 

1  Preface  to  the  Tempest.    He  helped  Davenant  to  vulgar 
ize  this  play. 

2  "  I  have  taken  some  pains  to  make  it  my  masterpiece  in 
English."     (Preface  to  Second  Miscellany.^)    Fox  said  that  it 
"  was  better  than  the  original."    J.  C.  Scaliger  said  of  Eras 
mus:    "  Ex  alieno  ingenio  poeta,  ex   suo  versificator. "     Fox 
indeed  preferred  the  "  Ode  to  Fortune"  above  its  Horatian 
original.    Dryden  has  certainly  let  out  a  reef  or  two  and  given 


66  DRYDEN 

fies  Milton's  remark  of  him,  that "  he  was  a  good 
rhymist,  but  no  poet."  To  look  at  all  sides,  and 
to  distrust  the  verdict  of  a  single  mood,  is,  no 
doubt,  the  duty  of  a  critic.  But  how  if  a  certain 
side  be  so  often  presented  as  to  thrust  forward  in 
the  memory  and  disturb  it  in  the  effort  to  recall 
that  total  impression  (for  the  office  of  a  critic  is 
not,  though  often  so  misunderstood,  to  say  guilty 
xor  not  guilty  of  some  particular  fact)  which  is  the 
*/  only  safe  ground  of  judgment?  It  is  the  weight 
of  the  whole  man,  not  of  one  or  the  other  limb 
of  him,  that  we  want.  Expende  Hannibalem. 
Very  good,  but  not  in  a  scale  capacious  only  of 
a  single  quality  at  a  time,  for  it  is  their  union, 
and  not  their  addition,  that  assures  the  value  of 
each  separately.  It  was  not  this  or  that  which 
gave  him  his  weight  in  council,  his  swiftness  of 
decision  in  battle  that  outran  the  forethought  of 
other  men,  —  it  was  Hannibal.  But  this  prosaic 
element  in  Dryden  will  force  itself  upon  me.  As 
I  read  him,  I  cannot  help  thinking  of  an  ostrich, 
to  be  classed  with  flying  things,  and  capable, 
what  with  leap  and  flap  together,  of  leaving  the 
earth  for  a  longer  or  shorter  space,  but  loving 
the  open  plain,  where  wing  and  foot  help  each 
other  to  something  that  is  both  flight  and  run 
at  once.  What  with  his  haste  and  a  certain  dash, 

a  fuller  sail  to  the  verse.  But  the  elegance  ?  The  restrained 
rather  than  bellying  expanse  of  phrase  ?  The  perfect  ade 
quacy  without  excess  ? 


DRYDEN  67 

which,  according  to  our  mood,  we  may  call  florid 
or  splendid,  he  seems  to  stand  among  poets 
where  Rubens  does  among  painters,  —  greater, 
perhaps,  as  a  colorist  than  an  artist,  yet  great 
here  also,  if  we  compare  him  with  any  but  the  first, 
We  have  arrived  at  Dryden's  thirty-second 
year,  and  thus  far  have  found  little  in  him  to 
warrant  an  augury  that  he  was  ever  to  be  one 
of  the  great  names  in  English  literature,  the 
most  perfect  type,  that  is,  of  his  class,  and  that 
class  a  high  one,  though  not  the  highest.  If 
Joseph  de  Maistre's  axiom,  j^a/'  napasvaincu 
a  trente  ans,  ne  vaincra  jamaisy  were  quite  true, 
there  would  be  little  hope  of  him,  for  he  has 
won  no  battle  yet.  But  there  is  something  solid 
and  doughty  in  the  man,  that  can  rise  from 
defeat,  the  stuff  of  which  victories  are  made  in 
due  time,  when  we  are  able  to  choose  our  posi 
tion  better,  and  the  sun  is  at  our  back.  Hith 
erto  his  performances  have  been  mainly  of  the 
obbligato  sort,  at  which  few  men  of  original  force 
are  good,  least  of  all  Dryden,  who  had  always 
something  of  stiffness  in  his  strength.  Waller 
had  praised  the  living  Cromwell  in  perhaps  the 
manliest  verses  he  ever  wrote,  —  not  very 
manly,  to  be  sure,  but  really  elegant,  and,  on 
the  whole,  better  than  those  in  which  Dryden 
squeezed  out  melodious  tears.  Waller,  who  had 
also  made  himself  conspicuous  as  a  volunteer 
Antony  to  the  country  squire  turned  Caesar, — 


68  DRYDEN 

("  With  ermine  clad  and  purple,  let  him  hold 
A  royal  sceptre  made  of  Spanish  gold  "),  — 

was  more  servile  than  Dryden  in  hailing  the 
return  of  ex  ojficio  Majesty.  He  bewails  to 
Charles,  in  snuffling  heroics,  - 

"  Our  sorrow  and  our  crime 
To  have  accepted  life  so  long  a  time, 
Without  you  here." 

A  weak  man,  put  to  the  test  by  rough  and 
angry  times,  as  Waller  was,  may  be  pitied,  but 
meanness  is  nothing  but  contemptible  under 
any  circumstances.  If  it  be  true  that  "every 
conqueror  creates  a  Muse,"  Cromwell  was  un 
fortunate.  Even  Milton's  sonnet,  though  digni 
fied,  is  reserved  if  not  distrustful.  Marvell's 
"  Horatian  Ode,"  the  most  truly  classic  in  our 
language,  is  worthy  of  its  theme.  The  same 
poet's  "  Elegy,"  in  parts  noble,  and  everywhere 
humanly  tender,  is  worth  more  than  all  Car- 
lyle's  biography  as  a  witness  to  the  gentler  quali 
ties  of  the  hero,  and  of  the  deep  affection  that 
stalwart  nature  could  inspire  in  hearts  of  truly 
masculine  temper.  As  it  is  little  known,  a  few 
verses  of  it  may  be  quoted  to  show  the  differ 
ence  between  grief  that  thinks  of  its  object  and 
grief  that  thinks  of  its  rhymes  :  - 

"  Valor,  religion,  friendship,  prudence  died 
At  once  with  him,  and  all  that  's  good  beside, 
And  we,  death's  refuse,  nature's  dregs,  confined 
To  loathsome  life,  alas  !  are  left  behind, 


DRYDEN  69 

Where  we  (so  once  we  used)  shall  now  no  more, 
To  fetch  day,  press  about  his  chamber  door, 
No  more  shall  hear  that  powerful  language  charm, 
Whose  force  oft  spared  the  labor  of  his  arm, 
No  more  shall  follow  where  he  spent  the  days 
In  war  or  counsel,  or  in  prayer  and  praise. 

I  saw  him  dead;   a  leaden  slumber  lies, 

And  mortal  sleep,  over  those  wakeful  eyes; 

Those  gentle  rays  under  the  lids  were  fled, 

Which  through  his  looks  that  piercing  sweetness  shed; 

That  port,  which  so  majestic  was  and  strong, 

Loose  and  deprived  of  vigor  stretched  along, 

All  withered,  all  discolored,  pale,  and  wan, 

How  much  another  thing!  no  more  That  Man! 

O  human  glory!  vain!   O  death!   O  wings! 

O  worthless  world!   O  transitory  things! 

Yet  dwelt  that  greatness  in  his  shape  decayed 

That  still,  though  dead,  greater  than  Death  he  laid, 

And,  in  his  altered  face,  you  something  feign 

That  threatens  Death  he  yet  will  live  again." 

Such  verses  might  not  satisfy  Lindley  Mur 
ray,  but  they  are  of  that  higher  mood  which 
satisfies  the  heart.  These  couplets,  too,  have 
an  energy  worthy  of  Milton's  friend  :  — 

"  When  up  the  armed  mountains  of  Dunbar 

He  marched,  and  through  deep  Severn,  ending  war." 

"  Thee,  many  ages  hence,  in  martial  verse 

Shall  the  English  soldier,  ere  he  charge,  rehearse." 

On  the  whole,  one  is  glad  that  Dryden's 
panegyric  on  the  Protector  was  so  poor.  It 
was  purely  official  verse-making.  Had  there 


70  DRYDEN 

been  any  feeling  in  it,  there  had  been  baseness 
in  his  address  to  Charles.  As  it  is,  we  may 
fairly  assume  that  he  was  so  far  sincere  in  both 
cases  as  to  be  thankful  for  a  chance  to  exercise 
himself  in  rhyme,  without  much  caring  whether 
upon  a  funeral  or  a  restoration.  He  might 
naturally  enough  expect  that  poetry  would  have 
a  better  chance  under  Charles  than  under  Crom 
well,  or  any  successor  with  -Commonwealth 
principles.  Cromwell  had  more  serious  matters 
to  think  about  than  verses,  while  Charles  might 
at  least  care  as  much  about  them  as  it  was  in 
his  base  good  nature  to  care  about  anything 
but  loose  women  and  spaniels.  Drydcn's  sound 
sense,  afterwards  so  conspicuous,  shows  itself 
even  in  these  pieces,  when  we  can  get  at  it 
through  the  tangled  thicket  of  tropical  phrase. 
But  the  authentic  and  unmistakable  Dryden 
first  manifests  himself  in  some  verses  addressed 
to  his  friend  Dr.  Charlton  in  1663.  We  have 
first  his  common  sense  which  has  almost  the 
point  of  wit,  yet  with  a  tang  of  prose  :  — 

"The  longest  tyranny  that  ever  swayed 
Was  that  wherein  our  ancestors  betrayed 
Their  freeborn  reason  to  the  Stagyrite, 
And  made  his  torch  their  universal  light. 
So  truth,  while  only  one  supplied  the  state, 
Grew  scarce  and  dear  and  yet  sophisticate. 
Still  it  was  bought,  like  empiric  wares  or  charms, 
Hard  words  seaUd  up  with  Aristotle*  s  arms." 


DRYDEN  71 

Then  we  have  his  easy  plenitude  of  fancy,  where 
he  speaks  of  the  inhabitants  of  the  New  World  as 

"  Guiltless  men  who  danced  away  their  time, 
Fresh  as  their  groves  and  happy  as  their  clime." 

And,  finally,  there  is  a  hint  of  imagination  where 
"mighty  visions  of  the  Danish  race"  watch  round 
Charles  sheltered  in  Stonehenge  after  the  battle 
of  Worcester.  These  passages  might  have  been 
written  by  the  Dryden  whom  we  learn  to  know 
fifteen  years  later.  They  have  the  advantage  that 
he  wrote  them  to  please  himself.  His  contem 
porary,  Dr.  Heylin,  said  of  French  cooks,  that 
"  their  trade  was  not  to  feed  the  belly,  but  the 
palate/'  Dryden  was  a  great  while  in  learning 
this  secret,  as  available  in  good  writing  as  in 
cookery.  He  strove  after  it,  but  his  thoroughly 
English  nature,  to  the  last,  would  too  easily 
content  itself  with  serving  up  the  honest  beef 
of  his  thought,  without  regard  to  daintiness  of 
flavor  in  the  dressing  of  it.1  Of  the  best  English 
poetry,  it  might  be  said  that  it  is  understanding 

1  In  one  of  the  last  letters  he  ever  wrote,  thanking  his 
cousin  Mrs.  Steward  for  a  gift  of  marrow-puddings,  he  says: 
"A  chine  of  honest  bacon  would  please  my  appetite  more  than 
all  the  marrow-puddings ;  for  I  like  them  better  plain,  having 
a  very  vulgar  stomach. "  So  of  Cowley  he  says  :  ' '  There  was 
plenty  enough,  but  ill  sorted,  whole  pyramids  of  sweetmeats 
for  boys  and  women,  but  little  of  solid  meat  for  men."  The 
physical  is  a  truer  anti-type  of  the  spiritual  man  than  we  are 
willing  to  admit,  and  the  brain  is  often  forced  to  acknowledge 
the  inconvenient  country-cousinship  of  the  stomach. 


72  DRYDEN 

aerated  by  imagination.  In  Dryden  the  solid 
part  too  often  refused  to  mix  kindly  with  the 
leaven,  either  remaining  lumpish  or  rising  to  a 
hasty  puffiness.  Grace  and  lightness  were  with 
him  much  more  a  laborious  achievement  than  a 
natural  gift,  and  it  is  all  the  more  remarkable 
that  he  should  so  often  have  attained  to  what 
seems  such  an  easy  perfection  in  both.  Always 
a  hasty  writer,1  he  was  long  in  forming  his  style* 
and  to  the  last  was  apt  to  snatch  the  readiest 
word  rather  than  wait  for  the  fittest.  He  was  not 
wholly  and  unconsciously  poet,  buta  thinker  who 
sometimes  lost  himself  on  enchanted  ground  and 
was  transfigured  by  its  touch.  This  preponder 
ance  in  him  of  the  reasoning  over  the  intuitive 
faculties,  the  one  always  there,  the  other  flash 
ing  in  when  you  least  expect  it,  accounts  for  that 
inequality  and  even  incongruousness  in  his  writ 
ing  which  makes  one  revise  one's  judgment  at 
every  tenth  page.  In  his  prose  you  come  upon 
passages  that  persuade  you  he  is  a  poet,  in  spite 
of  his  verses  so  often  turning  state's  evidence 
against  him  as  to  convince  you  he  is  none.  He 
is  a  prose-writer,  with  a  kind  of  ^olian  attach- 
1  In  his  preface  to  All  for  Love,  he  says,  evidently  allud 
ing  to  himself:  " If  he  have  a  friend  whose  hastiness  in  writ 
ing  is  his  greatest  fault,  Horace  would  have  taught  him  to  have 
minced  the  matter,  and  to  have  called  it  readiness  of  thought 
and  a  flowing  fancy."  And  in  the  Preface  to  the  Fables  he 
says  of  Homer:  "  This  vehemence  of  his,  I  confess,  is  more 
suitable  to  my  temper."  He  makes  other  allusions  to  it. 


DRYDEN  73 

ment.  For  example,  take  this  bit  of  prose  from 
the  dedication  of  his  version  of  Virgil's  "  Pas 
torals/'  1694:  "  He  found  the  strength  of  his 
genius  betimes,  and  was  even  in  his  youth  pre 
luding  to  his  Georgicks  and  his  ^neis.  He 
could  not  forbear  to  try  his  wings,  though  his 
pinions  were  not  hardened  to  maintain  a  long, 
laborious  flight;  yet  sometimes  they  bore  him 
to  a  pitch  as  lofty  as  ever  he  was  able  to  reach 
afterwards.  But  when  he  was  admonished  by 
his  subject  to  descend,  he  came  down  gently 
circling  in  the  air  and  singing  to  the  ground,  like 
a  lark  melodious  in  her  mounting  and  continu 
ing  her  song  till  she  alights,  still  preparing  for  a 
higher  flight  at  her  next  sally,  and  tuning  her 
voice  to  better  music."  This  is  charming,  and 
yet  even  this  wants  the  ethereal  tincture  that 
pervades  the  style  of  Jeremy  Taylor,  making  it, 
as  Burke  said  of  Sheridan's  eloquence,  "  neither 
prose  nor  poetry,  but  something  better  than 
either."  Let  us  compare  Taylor's  treatment  of 
the  same  image,  which,  I  fancy,  Dryden  must 
have  seen  :  "  For  so  have  I  seen  a  lark  rising 
from  his  bed  of  grass  and  soaring  upwards,  sing 
ing  as  he  rises,  and  hopes  to  get  to  heaven  and 
climb  above  the  clouds  ;  but  the  poor  bird  was 
beaten  back  by  the  loud  sighings  of  an  eastern 
wind,  and  his  motion  made  irregular  and  incon 
stant,  descending  more  at  every  breath  of  the 
tempest  than  it  could  recover  by  the  libration 


74  DRYDEN 

and  frequent  weighing  of  his  wings,  till  the  little 
creature  was  forced  to  sit  down  and  pant,  and 
stay  till  the  storm  was  over,  and  then  it  made  a 
prosperous  flight,  and  did  rise  and  sing  as  if  it 
had  learned  music  and  motion  of  an  angel  as  he 
passed  sometimes  through  the  air  about  his  min 
istries  here  below."  Taylor's  fault  is  that  his 
sentences  too  often  smell  of  the  library,  but 
what  an  open  air  is  here  !  How  unpremeditated 
it  all  seems  !  How  carelessly  he  knots  each  new 
thought,  as  it  comes,  to  the  one  before  it  with 
an  and,  like  a  girl  making  lace  !  And  what  a 
slidingly  musical  use  he  makes  of  the  sibilants 
with  which  our  language  is  unjustly  taxed  by 
those  who  can  only  make  them  hiss,  not  sing! 
There  are  twelve  of  them  in  the  first  twenty 
words,  fifteen  of  which  are  monosyllables.  We 
notice  the  structure  of  Dryden's  periods,  but  this 
grows  up  as  we  read.  It  gushes,  like  the  song 
of  the  bird  itself,  — 

"  In  profuse  strains  of  unpremeditated  art.' 
Let  us  now  take  a  specimen  of  Dryden's  bad 
prose  from  one  of  his  poems.    I  open  the  "  An- 
nus  Mirabilis"  at  random,  and  hit  upon  this:  — 

"  Our  little  fleet  was  now  engaged  so  far, 
That,  like  the  swordfish  in  the  whale,  they  fought: 
The  combat  only  seemed  a  civil  war, 
Till  through  their  bowels  we  our  passage  wrought." 

Is  this  Dryden,  or  Sternhold,  or  Shad  well,  those 
Toms  who  made  him  say  that "  dulness  was  fatal 


DRYDEN  75 

to  the  name  of  Tom  "  ?  The  natural  history  of 
Goldsmith  in  the  verse  of  Pye  !  His  thoughts 
did  not "  voluntary  move  harmonious  numbers." 
He  had  his  choice  between  prose  and  verse,  and 
seems  to  be  poetical  on  second  thought.  I  do 
not  speak  without  book.  He  was  more  than 
half  conscious  of  it  himself.  In  the  same  letter 
to  Mrs.  Steward,  just  cited,  he  says,  "  I  am  still 
drudging  on,  always  a  poet  and  never  a  good 
one  ";  and  this  from  no  mock-modesty,  for  he 
is  always  handsomely  frank  in  telling  us  what 
ever  of  his  own  doing  pleased  him.  This  was 
written  in  the  last  year  of  his  life,  and  at  about 
the  same  time  he  says  elsewhere  :  "  What  judg 
ment  I  had  increases  rather  than  diminishes,  and 
thoughts,  such  as  they  are,  come  crowding  in  so 
fast  upon  me  that  my  only  difficulty  is  to  choose 
or  to  reject,  to  run  them  into  verse  or  to  give 
them  the  other  harmony  of  prose;  I  have  so  long 
studied  and  practised  both,  that  they  are  grown 
into  a  habit  and  become  familiar  to  me."  l  I 
think  that  a  man  who  was  primarily  a  poet 
would  hardly  have  felt  this  equanimity  of  choice. 
I  find  a  confirmation  of  this  feeling  about 
Dryden  in  his  early  literary  loves.  His  taste 
was  not  an  instinct,  but  the  slow  result  of  reflec 
tion  and  of  the  manfulness  with  which  he  always 
acknowledged  to  himself  his  own  mistakes.  In 
this  latter  respect  few  men  deal  so  magnani- 
1  Preface  to  the  Fables. 


76  DRYDEN 

mously  with  themselves  as  he,  and  accordingly 
few  have  been  so  happily  inconsistent.  Ancora 
imparo  might  have  served  him  for  a  motto  as 
well  as  Michel  Angelo.  His  prefaces  are  a  com 
plete  log  of  his  life,  and  the  habit  of  writing  them 
was  a  useful  one  to  him,  for  it  forced  him  to 
think  with  a  pen  in  his  hand,  which,  according 
to  Goethe,  "  if  it  do  no  other  good,  keeps  the 
mind  from  staggering  about.'*  In  these  prefaces 
we  see  his  taste  gradually  rising  from  Du  Bartas 
to  Spenser,  from  Cowley  to  Milton,  from  Cor- 
neille  to  Shakespeare.  "  I  remember  when  I  was 
a  boy,"  he  says  in  his  dedication  of  the  "  Spanish 
Friar,"  1681,  "I  thought  inimitable  Spenser  a 
mean  poet  in  comparison  of  Sylvester's  Du  Bar 
tas,  and  was  rapt  into  an  ecstasy  when  I  read 
these  lines  :  — 

«'  '  Now  when  the  winter's  keener  breath  began 
To  crystallize  the  Baltic  ocean, 
To  glaze  the  lakes,  to  bridle  up  the  floods, 
And  periwig  with  snow  '  the  baldpate  woods.' 

I  am  much  deceived  if  this  be  not  abominable 
fustian."  Swift,  in  his  "Tale  of  a  Tub,"  has  a 


is  Sylvester's  word.  Drydcn  reminds  us  of  Burke 
in  this  also,  that  he  always  quotes  from  memory  and  seldom 
exactly.  His  memory  was  better  for  things  than  for  words. 
This  helps  to  explain  the  length  of  time  it  took  him  to  master 
that  vocabulary  at  last  so  various,  full,  and  seemingly  extempo 
raneous.  He  is  a  large  quoter,  though,  with  his  usual  in 
consistency,  he  says,  "I  am  no  admirer  of  quotations." 
(Essay  on  Heroic  Plays.) 


DRYDEN 

ludicrous  passage  in  this  style  :  "  Look  on  this 
globe  of  earth,  you  will  find  it  to  be  a  very  com 
plete  and  fashionable  dress.  What  is  that  which 
some  call  land  but  a  fine  coat  faced  with  green  ? 
or  the  sea,  but  a  waistcoat  of  water-tabby  ?  Pro 
ceed  to  the  particular  works  of  creation,  you  will 
find  how  curious  journeyman  Nature  has  been 
to  trim  up  the  vegetable  beaux ;  observe  how 
sparkish  a  periwig  adorns  the  head  of  a  beech,  and 
what  a  fine  doublet  of  white  satin  is  worn  by  the 
birch."  The  fault  is  not  in  any  inaptness  of  the 
images,  nor  in  the  mere  vulgarity  of  the  things 
themselves,  but  in  that  of  the  associations  they 
awaken.  The  "  prithee,  undo  this  button  "  of 
Lear,  coming  where  it  does  and  expressing  what 
it  does,  is  one  of  those  touches  of  the  pathet 
ically  sublime,  of  which  only  Shakespeare  ever 
knew  the  secret.  Herrick,  too,  has  a  charming 
poem  on"  Julia's  petticoat,"  thecharm  being  that 
he  exalts  the  familiar  and  the  low  to  the  region 
of  sentiment.  In  the  passage  from  Sylvester,  it 
is  precisely  the  reverse,  and  the  wig  takes  as 
much  from  the  sentiment  as  it  adds  to  a  Lord 
Chancellor.  So  Pope's  proverbial  verse  — 

"  True  wit  is  Nature  to  advantage  drest  " 

unpleasantly  suggests  Nature  under  the  hands 
of  a  lady's-maid.1  We  have  no  word  in  English 

1  In  the  Epimetheus  of  a  poet  usually  as  elegant  as  Gra} 
himself,  one's  finer  sense  is  a  little  jarred  by  the 
"Spectral  gleam  their  snow-white  </mj«.'* 


78  DRYDEN 

that  will  exactly  define  this  want  of  propriety  in 
diction.  Vulgar  is  too  strong,  and  commonplace 
too  weak.  Perhaps  bourgeois  comes  as  near  as 
any.  It  is  to  be  noticed  that  Dryden  does  not 
unequivocally  condemn  the  passage  he  quotes, 
but  qualifies  it  with  an  "  if  I  am  not  much  mis 
taken."  Indeed,  though  his  judgment  in  sub- 
stantials,  like  that  of  Johnson,  is  always  worth 
having,  his  taste,  the  negative  half  of  genius, 
never  altogether  refined  itself  from  a  colloquial 
familiarity,  which  is  one  of  the  charms  of  his 
prose,  and  gives  that  air  of  easy  strength  in 
which  his  satire  is  unmatched.  In  his  "  Royal 
Martyr"  (1669),  the  tyrant  Maximin  says  to 
the  gods  :  — 

"  Keep  you  your  rain  and  sunshine  in  the  skies, 
And  I  '11  keep  back  my  flame  and  sacrifice; 
Tour  trade  of  Heaven  shall  soon  be  at  a  stand. 
And  all  your  goods  lie  dead  upon  your  hand,'* 

a  passage  which  has  as  many  faults  as  only  Dry- 
den  was  capable  of  committing,  even  to  a  false 
idiom  forced  by  the  last  rhyme.  The  same 
tyrant  in  dying  exclaims  :- 

«'  And  after  thee  I  '11  go, 
Revenging  still,  an     following  e'en   to  th*  other  world  my 

blow, 

And,  shoving  back  this  earth  on  which  I  //'/, 
/'//  mount  and  scatter  all  the  gods  I  hit." 

In  the  "Conquest  of  Granada  "  (1670),  we 
have : — 


DRYDEN  79 

ce  This  little  loss  in  our  vast  body  shews 
So  small,  that  half  have  never  heard  the  news; 
Fame  'j  out  of  breath  e*  er  she  can  fly  so  far 
To  tell  *  em  all  that  you  have  e* er  made  warS*  * 

And  in  the  same  play, — 

"  That  busy  thing, 

The  soul,  is  packing  up,  and  just  on  wing 
Like  parting  swallows  when  they  seek  the  spring,*' — • 

where  the  last  sweet  verse  curiously  illustrates 
that  inequality  (poetry  on  a  prose  background) 
which  so  often  puzzles  us  in  Dryden.  Infinitely 
worse  is  the  speech  of  Almanzor  to  his  mother's 
ghost :  — 

"  I  '11  rush  into  the  covert  of  the  night 

And  pull  thee  backward  by  the  shroud  to  light, 
Or  else  I  '11  squeeze  thee  like  a  bladder  there, 
And  make  thee  groan  thyself  away  to  air." 

What  wonder  that  Dryden  should  have  been 
substituted  for  Davenant  as  the  butt  of  the 
"  Rehearsal/'  and  that  the  parody  should  have 
had  such  a  run  ?  And  yet  it  was  Dryden  who, 

1  This  probably  suggested  to  Young  the  grandiose  image 
in  his  Last  Day  (bk.  ii.):  — 

*'  Those  overwhelming  armies   .    .    . 

Whose  rear  lay  wrapt  in  night,  while  breaking  dawn 
Roused  the  broad  front  and  called  the  battle  on." 

This,  to  be  sure,  is  no  plagiarism;  but  it  should  be  carried  to 
Dryden's  credit  that  we  catch  the  poets  of  the  next  half  cen 
tury  oftener  with  their  hands  in  his  pockets  than  in  those  of 
any  one  else. 


80  DRYDEN 

in  speaking  of  Persius,  hit  upon  the  happy 
phrase  of  "  boisterous  metaphors  "  ; '  it  was 
Dryden  who  said  of  Cowley,  whom  he  else 
where  calls  "  the  darling  of  my  youth,"  *  that 
he  was  "  sunk  in  reputation  because  he  could 
never  forgive  any  conceit  which  came  in  his 
way,  but  swept,  like  a  drag-net,  great  and 
small."3  But  the  passages  I  have  thus  far  cited 
as  specimens  of  our  poet's  coarseness  (for  poet 
he  surely  was  intus,  though  not  always  in  cute] 
were  written  before  he  was  forty,  and  he  had  an 

1  Essay  on  Satirf.  *  Ibid. 

3  Preface  to  Fables.  Men  are  always  inclined  to  revenge 
themselves  on  their  old  idols  in  the  first  enthusiasm  of  conversion 
to  a  purer  faith.  Cowley  had  all  the  faults  that  Dryden  loads 
him  with,  and  yet  his  popularity  was  to  some  extent  deserved. 
He  at  least  had  a  theory  that  poetry  should  soar,  not  creep,  and 
longed  for  some  expedient,  in  the  failure  of  natural  wings,  by 
which  he  could  lift  himself  away  from  the  conventional  and  com 
monplace.  By  beating  out  the  substance  of  Pindar  very  thin,  he 
contrived  a  kind  of  balloon  which,  tumid  with  gas,  did  certainly 
mount  a  little,  into  the  clouds,  if  not  above  them,  though  sure 
to  come  suddenly  down  with  a  bump.  His  odes,  indeed,  are 
an  alternation  of  upward  jerks  and  concussions,  and  smack 
more  of  Chapelain  than  of  the  Theban,  but  his  prose  is  very 
agreeable,  —  Montaigne  and  water,  perhaps,  but  with  some 
flavor  of  the  Gascon  wine  left.  The  strophe  of  his  ode  to  Dr. 
Scarborough,  in  which  he  compares  his  surgical  friend,  oper 
ating  for  the  stone,  to  Moses  striking  the  rock,  more  than  jus 
tifies  all  the  ill  that  Dryden  could  lay  at  his  door.  It  was  into 
precisely  such  mud-holes  that  Cowley's  Will-o'-the-Wisp  had 
misguided  him.  Men  may  never  wholly  shake  off  a  vice  but 
they  are  always  conscious  of  it,  and  hate  the  tempter. 


DRYDEN  81 

odd  notion,  suitable  to  his  healthy  complexion, 
that  poets  on  the  whole  improve  after  that  date. 
Man  at  forty,  he  says,  "  seems  to  be  fully  in 
his  summer  tropic,  .  .  .  and  I  believe  that  it 
will  hold  in  all  great  poets  that,  though  they 
wrote  before  with  a  certain  heat  of  genius  which 
inspired  them,  yet  that  heat  was  not  perfectly 
digested."  *  But  artificial  heat  is  never  to  be 
digested  at  all,  as  is  plain  in  Dryden's  case.  He 
was  a  man  who  warmed  slowly,  and,  in  his  hurry 
to  supply  the  market,  forced  his  mind.  The 
result  was  the  same  after  forty  as  before.  In 
u  CEdipus  "  (1679)  we  find  - 

'•  Not  one  bolt 

Shall  err  from  Thebes,  but  more  be  called  for,  more, 
New-moulded  thunder  of  a  larger  size  !  " 

This  play  was  written  in  conjunction  with  Lee, 
of  whom  Dryden  relates2  that,  when  some  one 
said  to  him,  "It  is  easy  enough  to  write  like  a 
madman,"  he  replied,  "No,  it  is  hard  to  write 
like  a  madman,  but  easy  enough  to  write  like  a 
fool," — perhaps  the  most  compendious  lecture 
on  poetry everdelivered.  The  splendid  bitof  elo 
quence,  which  has  so  much  the  sheet-iron  clang 
of  impeachment  thunder  (I  hope  that  Dryden 
is  not  in  the  Library  of  Congress  !)  is  perhaps 
Lee's.  The  following  passage  almost  certainly 
is  his :  — 

1  Dedication  of  Georgia. 

2  In  a  letter  to  Dennis,   1693. 


82  DRYDEN 

"Sure  't  is  the  end  of  all  things  !    Fate  has  torn 
The  lock  of  Time  off,  and  his  head  is  now 
The  ghastly  ball  of  round  Eternity!  " 

But  the  next,  in  which  the  soul  is  likened  to  the 
pocket  of  an  indignant  housemaid  charged  with 
theft,  is  wholly  in  Dryden's  manner :  — 

"  No;  I  dare  challenge  heaven  to  turn  me  outward, 
And  shake  my  soul  quite  empty  in  your  sight." 

In  the  same  style,  he  makes  his  Don  Sebastian 
(1690)  say  that  he  is  as  much  astonished  as 
"  frowsy  mortals  "  at  the  last  trump, — 

««  When,  called  in  haste,  they  fumble  for  their  limbs,"  — 

and  propose  to  take  upon  himself  the  whole  of 
a  crime  shared  with  another  by  asking  Heaven 
to  charge  the  bill  on  him.  And  in  "King  Arthur," 
written  ten  years  after  the  Preface  from  which  I 
have  quoted  his  confession  about  Du  Bartas,  we 
have  a  passage  precisely  of  the  kind  he  con 
demned  :  — 

"  Ah  for  the  many  souls  as  but  this  morn 
Were  clothed  with  flesh  and  warmed  with  vital  blood, 
But  naked  now,  or  shir  ted  but  with  air." 

Dryden  too  often  violated  his  own  admirable 
rule,  that  "  an  author  is  not  to  write  all  he  can, 
but  only  all  he  ought."  '  In  his  worst  images, 
however,  there  is  often  a  vividness  that  half 
excuses  them.  But  it  is  a  grotesque  vividness, 

1   Preface  to  Fables. 


DRYDEN  83 

as  from  the  flare  of  a  bonfire.  They  do  not  flash 
into  sudden  lustre,  as  in  the  great  poets,  where 
the  imaginations  of  poet  and  reader  leap  toward 
each  other  and  meet  halfway. 

English  prose  is  indebted  to  Dryden  for  hav 
ing  freed  it  from  the  cloister  of  pedantry.  He, 
more  than  any  other  single  writer,  contributed, 
as  well  by  precept  as  example,  to  give  it  supple 
ness  of  movement  and  the  easier  air  of  the  mod 
ern  world.  His  own  style,  juicy  with  proverbial 
phrases,  has  that  familiar  dignity,  so  hard  to 
attain,  perhaps  unattainable  except  by  one  who, 
like  Dryden,  feels  that  his  position  is  assured. 
Charles  Cotton  is  as  easy,  but  not  so  elegant ; 
Walton  as  familiar,  but  not  so  flowing ;  Swift 
as  idiomatic,  but  not  so  elevated ;  Burke  more 
splendid,  but  not  so  equally  luminous.  That 
his  style  was  no  easy  acquisition  (though,  of 
course,  the  aptitude  was  innate)  he  himself  tells 
us.  I  n  his  dedication  of  "  Troilus  and  Cressida  " 
(1679*),  where  he  seems  to  hint  at  the  erection 
of  an  Academy,  he  says  that  "  the  perfect  know 
ledge  of  a  tongue  was  never  attained  by  any' 
single  person.  The  Court,  the  College,  and  the 
Town  must  all  be  joined  in  it.  And  as  our  Eng 
lish  is  a  composition  of  the  dead  and  living 
tongues,  there  is  required  a  perfect  knowledge, 
not  only  of  the  Greek  and  Latin,  but  of  the  Old 
German,  French,  and  Italian,  and  to  help  all 
these,  a  conversation  with  those  authors  of  our 


84  DRYDEN 

own  who  have  written  with  the  fewest  faults  in 
prose  and  verse.  But  how  barbarously  we  yet 
write  and  speak  your  Lordship  knows,  and  I 
am  sufficiently  sensible  in  my  own  English.1 
For  I  am  often  put  to  a  stand  in  considering 
whether  what  I  write  be  the  idiom  of  the  tongue, 
or  false  grammar  and  nonsense  couched  beneath 
that  specious  name  of  Anglicism,  and  have  no 
other  way  to  clear  my  doubts  but  by  translat 
ing  my  English  into  Latin,  and  thereby  trying 
what  sense  the  words  will  bear  in  a  more  stable 
language."  Tantae  mo/is  erat.  Five  years  later  : 
"The  proprieties  and  delicacies  of  the  English 
are  known  to  few;  it  is  impossible  even  for  a 
good  wit  to  understand  and  practise  them  with 
out  the  help  of  a  liberal  education,  long  read 
ing  and  digesting  of  those  few  good  authors  we 
have  amongst  us,  the  knowledge  of  men  and 
manners,  the  freedom  of  habitudes  and  conversa 
tion  with  the  best  company  of  both  sexes ,  and,  in 
short,  without  wearing  off  the  rust  which  he 
contracted  while  he  was  laying  in  a  stock  of 
learning."  In  the  passage  1  have  italicized,  it 

1  More  than  half  a  century  later,  Orrery,  in  his  «'  Re 
marks  "  on  Swift,  says:  "  We  speak  and  we  write  at  ran 
dom;  and  if  a  man's  common  conversation  were  committed 
to  paper,  he  would  be  startled  for  to  find  himself  guilty  in  so 
few  sentences  of  so  many  solecisms  and  such  false  English." 
I  do  not  remember  for  to  anywhere  in  Dryden's  prose.  So 
few  has  long  been  denizened;  no  wonder,  since  it  is  nothing 
more  than  //  peu  Anglicized. 


DRYDEN  85 

will  be  seen  that  Dryden  lays  some  stress  upon 
the  influence  of  women  in  refining  language. 
Swift,  also,  in  his  plan  for  an  Academy,  says  : 
"  Now,  though  I  would  by  no  means  give  the 
ladies  the  trouble  of  advising  us  in  the  reforma 
tion  of  our  language,  yet  I  cannot  help  thinking 
that,  since  they  have  been  left  out  of  all  meet 
ings  except  parties  at  play,  or  where  worse  de 
signs  are  carried  on,  our  conversation  has  very 
much  degenerated."'  '  Swift  affirms  that  the 
language  had  grown  corrupt  since  the  Restora 
tion,  and  that  "  the  Court,  which  used  to  be  the 
standard  of  propriety  and  correctness  of  speech, 
was  then,  and,  I  think,  has  ever  since  continued, 
the  worst  school  in  England."  2  He  lays  the 

1  Letter  to  the  Lord  High  Treasurer. 

2  Ibid.    He  complains  of  "  manglings  and  abbreviations." 
"  What  does  your  Lordship  think  of  the  words  drudg'd,  dis 
turb' d,  rebuk'd,  fledg'd,  and  a  thousand  others  5  "    In  a  con 
tribution  to  the  Tatler  (No.  230)  he  ridicules  the  use  of  y urn 
for  them,  and  a  number  of  slang  phrases,  among  which  is  mob. 
t(  The  war,"  he  says,  "  has  introduced  abundance  of  polysyl 
lables,  which  will  never  be  able  to  live  many  more  campaigns." 
Speculations,    operations,  preliminaries,  ambassadors,  pallisa- 
does,  communication,  circumvallation,  battalions,  are  the  in 
stances  he  gives,  and  all  are  now  familiar.    No  man,  or  body 
of  men,  can  dam  the  stream  of  language.    Dry  den   is   rath'er 
fond  of  *  em  for  them,  but  uses  it  rarely  in  his  prose.     Swift 
himself  prefers  '/  is  to  /'/  /'/,  as  does  Emerson  still.    In  what 
Swift  says  of  the  poets,  he  may  be  fairly  suspected  of  glancing 
at   Dryden,  who  was  his  kinsman,  and  whose  prefaces  and 
translation  of  Virgil  he  ridicules  in  the  Tale  of  a  Tub.    Dry- 


86  DRYDEN 

blame  partly  on  the  general  licentiousness,  partly 
upon  the  French  education  of  many  of  Charles's 
courtiers,  and  partly  on  the  poets.  Dryden 
undoubtedly  formed  his  diction  by  the  usage  of 
the  Court.  The  age  was  a  very  free-and-easy, 
not  to  say  a  very  coarse  one.  Its  coarseness 
was  not  external,  like  that  of  Elizabeth's  day, 
but  the  outward  mark  of  an  inward  depravity. 
What  Swift's  notion  of  the  refinement  of  women 
was  may  be  judged  by  his  anecdotes  of  Stella.  I 
will  not  say  that  Dryden's  prose  did  not  gain  by 
the  conversational  elasticity  which  his  frequent 
ing  men  and  women  of  the  world  enabled  him 
to  give  it.  It  is  the  best  specimen  of  every-day 
style  that  we  have.  But  the  habitual  dwelling 
of  his  mind  in  a  commonplace  atmosphere,  and 
among  those  easy  levels  of  sentiment  which 
befitted  Will's  Coffee-house  and  the  Bird-cage 
Walk,  was  a  damage  to  his  poetry.  Solitude  is 
as  needful  to  the  imagination  as  society  is  whole 
some  for  the  character.  He  cannot  always  dis 
tinguish  between  enthusiasm  and  extravagance 

den  is  reported  to  have  said  of  him,  "  Cousin  Swift  is  no 
poet."  The  Dean  began  his  literary  career  by  Pindaric  odes 
to  Athenian  Societies  and  the  like, — perhaps  the  greatest  mis 
take  as  to  his  own  powers  of  which  an  author  was  ever  guilty. 
It  was  very  likely  that  he  would  send  these  to  his  relative, 
already  distinguished,  for  his  opinion  upon  them.  If  this  was 
so,  the  justice  of  Dryden's  judgment  must  have  added  to  the 
smart.  Swift  never  forgot  or  forgave;  Dryden  was  careless 
enough  to  do  the  one,  and  large  enough  to  do  the  other. 


DRYDEN  87 

when  he  sees  them.  But  apart  from  these  influ 
ences  which  I  have  adduced  in  exculpation,  there 
was  certainly  a  vein  of  coarseness  in  him,  a  want 
of  that  exquisite  sensitiveness  which  is  the  con 
science  of  the  artist.  An  old  gentleman,  writing 
to  the  tc  Gentleman's  Magazine  "  in  1745,  pro 
fesses  to  remember  "plain  John  Dryden  (before 
he  paid  his  court  with  success  to  the  great)  in 
one  uniform  clothing  of  Norwich  drugget.  I 
have  eat  tarts  at  the  Mulberry  Garden  with  him 
and  Madam  Reeve,  when  our  author  advanced 
to  a  sword  and  Chadreux  wig."  '  I  always  fancy 
Dryden  in  the  drugget,  with  wig,  lace  ruffles, 
and  sword  superimposed.  It  is  the  type  of  this 
curiously  incongruous  man. 

1  Both  Malone  and  Scott  accept  this  gentleman's  evidence 
without  question,  but  I  confess  suspicion  of  a  memory  that 
runs  back  more  than  eighty-one  years,  and  recollects  a  man 
before  he  had  any  claim  to  remembrance.  Dryden  was  never 
poor,  and  there  is  at  Oxford  a  portrait  of  him  painted  in  1 664, 
which  represents  him  in  a  superb  periwig  and  laced  band. 
This  was  «« before  he  had  paid  his  court  with  success  to  the 
great."  But  the  story  is  at  least  ben  trovato,  and  morally  true 
enough  to  serve  as  an  illustration.  Who  the  '«  old  gentleman  " 
was  has  never  been  discovered.  Of  Crowne  (who  has  some 
interest  for  us  as  a  sometime  student  at  Harvard)  he  says  : 
«'  Many  a  cup  of  metheglin  have  I  drank  with  little  starch' d 
Johnny  Crown;  we  called  him  so,  from  the  stiff,  unalterable 
primness  of  his  long  cravat."  Cro\vne  reflects  no  more  credit 
on  his  Alma  Mater  than  Downing.  Both  were  sneaks,  and  of 
such  a  kind  as,  I  think,  can  only  be  produced  by  a  debauched 
Puritanism.  Crowne,  as  a  rival  of  Dryden,  is  contemptuously 
alluded  to  by  Cibber  in  his  Apology. 


88  DRYDEN 

The  first  poem  by  which  Dryden  won  a 
general  acknowledgment  of  his  power  was  the 
"  Annus  Mirabilis,"  written  in  his  thirty-seventh 
year.  Pepys,  himself  not  altogether  a  bad  judge, 
doubtless  expresses  the  common  opinion  when 
he  says :  "  I  am  very  well  pleased  this  night 
with  reading  a  poem  I  brought  home  with  me 
last  night  from  Westminster  Hall,  of  Dryden's, 
upon  the  present  war;  a  very  good  poem."1 
And  a  very  good  poem,  in  some  sort,  it  con 
tinues  to  be,  in  spite  of  its  amazing  blemishes. 
We  must  always  bear  in  mind  that  Dryden 
lived  in  an  age  that  supplied  him  with  no  ready- 
made  inspiration,  and  that  big  phrases  and 
images  are  apt  to  be  pressed  into  the  service 
when  great  ones  do  not  volunteer.  With  this 
poem  begins  the  long  series  of  Dryden's  pre 
faces,  of  which  Swift  made  such  excellent,  though 
malicious,  fun  that  I  cannot  forbear  to  quote  it. 
"  I  do  utterly  disapprove  and  declare  against 
that 'pernicious  custom  of  making  the  preface 
a  bill  of  fare  to  the  book.  For  I  have  always 
looked  upon  it  as  a  high  point  of  indiscretion 
in  monster-mongersand  other  retailers  of  strange 
sights  to  hang  out  a  fair  picture  over  the  door, 
drawn  after  the  life,  with  a  most  eloquent  de- 

1  Diary,  iii.  390.  Almost  the  only  notices  of  Dryden  that 
make  him  alive  to  me  I  have  found  in  the  delicious  book  of  this 
Polonius-Montaigne,  the  only  man  who  ever  had  the  courage 
to  keep  a  sincere  journal,  even  under  the  shelter  of  cipher. 


DRYDEN  89 

scription  underneath  ;  this  has  saved  me  many 
a  threepence.  .  .  .  Such  is  exactly  the  fate  at 
this  time  of  prefaces,  .  .  .  This  expedient  was 
admirable  at  first ;  our  great  Dryden  has  long 
carried  it  as  far  as  it  would  go,  and  with  incred 
ible  success.  He  has  often  said  to  me  in  con 
fidence,  c  that  the  world  would  never  have  sus 
pected  him  to  be  so  great  a  poet,  if  he  had  not 
assured  them  so  frequently,  in  his  prefaces,  that 
it  was  impossible  they  could  either  doubt  or 
forget  it.'  Perhaps  it  may  be  so ;  however,  I 
much  fear  his  instructions  have  edified  out  of 
their  place,  and  taught  men  to  grow  wiser  in 
certain  points  where  he  never  intended  they 
should."  '  The  monster-mongers  is  a  terrible 
thrust,  when  we  remember  some  of  the  come 
dies  and  heroic  plays  which  Dryden  ushered  in 
this  fashion.  In  the  dedication  of  the  "  Annus  " 
to  the  city  of  London  is  one  of  those  pithy  sen 
tences  of  which  Dryden  is  ever  afterwards  so 
full,  and  which  he  lets  fall  with  a  carelessness 
that  seems  always  to  deepen  the  meaning  :  "  I 
have  heard,  indeed,  of  some  virtuous  persons 
who  have  ended  unfortunately,  but  never  of 
any  virtuous  nation  ;  Providence  is  engaged  too 
deeply  when  the  cause  becomes  so  general. " 

1  Tale  of  a  Tub,  sect.  v.  Pepys  also  speaks  of  buying  the 
Maiden  Queen  of  Mr.  Dry  den's,  which  he  himself,  in  his 
preface,  seems  to  brag  of,  and  indeed  is  a  good  play.  (i8th 
January,  1668.) 


9o  DRYDEN 

In  his  "  account  "  of  the  poem  in  a  letter  to 
Sir  Robert  Howard  he  says  :  "  I  have  chosen 
to  write  my  poem  in  quatrains  or  stanzas  of  four 
in  alternate  rhyme,  because  I  have  ever  judged 
them  more  noble  and  of  greater  dignity,  both 
for  the  sound  and  number,  than  any  other  verse 
in  use  amongst  us.  ...  The  learned  languages 
have  certainly  a  great  advantage  of  us  in  not 
being  tied  to  the  slavery  of  any  rhyme.  .  .  . 
But  in  this  necessity  of  our  rhymes,  I  have  al 
ways  found  the  couplet  verse  most  easy,  though 
not  so  proper  for  this  occasion ;  for  there  the 
work  is  sooner  at  an  end,  every  two  lines  con 
cluding  the  labor  of  the  poet."  A  little  further 
on  :  "  They  [the  French]  write  in  alexandrines, 
or  verses  of  six  feet,  such  as  amongst  us  is  the 
old  translation  of  Homer  by  Chapman:  all 
which,  by  lengthening  their  chain,1  makes  the 

1  He  is  fond  of  this  image.  In  the  Maiden  Queen  Cela 
don  tells  Sabina  that,  when  he  is  with  her  rival  Florimel,  his 
heart  is  still  her  prisoner,  ««  it  only  draws  a  longer  chain  after 
it."  Goldsmith's  fancy  was  taken  by  it;  and  everybody  ad 
mires  in  the  "  Traveller  "  the  extraordinary  conceit  of  a 
heart  dragging  a  lengthening  chain.  The  smoothness  of  too 
many  rhymed  pentameters  is  that  of  thin  ice  over  shallow 
water;  so  long  as  we  glide  along  rapidly,  all  is  well;  but  if 
we  dwell  a  moment  on  any  one  spot,  we  may  find  ourselves 
knee-deep  in  mud.  A  later  poet,  in  trying  to  improve  on 
Goldsmith,  shows  the  ludicrousness  of  the  image:  — 
"  And  round  my  heart's  leg  ties  its  galling  chain." 

To  write  imaginatively  a  man  should  have  —  imagination! 


DRYDEN  91 

sphere  of  their  activity  the  greater."  I  have 
quoted  these  passages  because,  in  a  small  com 
pass,  they  include  several  things  characteristic 
of  Dryden.  "  I  have  ever  judged,"  and  "  I 
have  always  found,"  are  particularly  so.  If  he 
took  up  an  opinion  in  the  morning,  he  would 
have  found  so  many  arguments  for  it  before 
night  that  it  would  seem  already  old  and  fa 
miliar.  So  with  his  reproach  of  rhyme ;  a  year 
or  two  before  he  was  eagerly  defending  it ;  l 
again  a  few  years,  and  he  will  utterly  condemn 
and  drop  it  in  his  plays,  while  retaining  it  in 
his  translations  ;  afterwards  his  study  of  Milton 
leads  him  to  think  that  blank  verse  would  suit 
the  epic  style  better,  and  he  proposes  to  try  it 
with  Homer,  but  at  last  translates  one  book 
as  a  specimen,  and  behold,  it  is  in  rhyme  !  But 
the  charm  of  this  great  advocate  is,  that,  what 
ever  side  he  was  on,  he  could  always  find  ex 
cellent  reasons  for  it,  and  state  them  with  great 
force  and  abundance  of  happy  illustration.  He 
is  an  exception  to  the  proverb,  and  is  none  the 
worse  pleader  that  he  is  always  pleading  his 
own  cause.  The  blunder  about  Chapman  is  of 
a  kind  into  which  his  hasty  temperament  often 
betrayed  him.  He  remembered  that  Chapman's 
"  Iliad  "  was  in  a  long  measure,  concluded  with- 

1  See  his  epistle  dedicatory  to  the  Rival  Ladies  (1664). 
For  the  other  side,  see  particularly  a  passage  in  his  Discourse 
on  Epic  Poetry  (1697). 


92  DRYDEN 

out  looking  that  it  was  alexandrine,  and  then 
attributes  it  generally  to  his"  Homer."  Chap 
man's  "  Iliad  "is  done  in  fourteen-sy  liable  verse, 
and  his  "  Odyssee  "  in  the  very  metre  that  Dry- 
den  himself  used  in  his  own  version.1  I  remark 
also  what  he  says  of  the  couplet,  that  it  was 
easy  because  the  second  verse  concludes  the 
labor  of  the  poet.  And  yet  it  was  Dryden  who 
found  it  hard  for  that  very  reason.  His  vehe 
ment  abundance  refused  those  narrow  banks, 
first  running  over  into  a  triplet,  and,  even  then 
uncontainable,  rising  to  an  alexandrine  in  the 
concluding  verse.  And  I  have  little  doubt  that 
it  was  the  roominess,  rather  than  the  dignity, 
of  the  quatrain  which  led  him  to  choose  it.  As 
apposite  to  this,  I  may  quote  what  he  elsewhere 
says  of  octosyllabic  verse  :  "  The  thought  can 
turn  itself  with  greater  ease  in  a  larger  compass. 
When  the  rhyme  comes  too  thick  upon  us,  it 

1  In  the  same  way  he  had  two  years  before  assumed  that 
Shakespeare  ««  was  the  first  who,  to  shun  the  pains  of  con 
tinued  rhyming,  invented  that  kind  of  writing  which  we  call 
blank  verse  "!  Dryden  was  never,  I  suspect,  a  very  caretul 
student  of  English  literature.  He  seems  never  to  have  known 
that  Surrey  translated  a  part  of  the  jEneid  (and  with  great 
spirit)  into  blank  verse.  Indeed,  he  was  not  a  scholar,  in 
the  proper  sense  of  the  word,  but  he  had  that  faculty  of  rapid 
assimilation  without  study,  so  remarkable  in  Coleridge  and 
other  rich  minds,  whose  office  is  rather  to  impregnate  than  to 
invent.  These  brokers  of  thought  perform  a  great  office  in 
literature,  second  only  to  that  of  originators. 


DRYDEN  93 

straitens  the  expression  :  we  are  thinking  of  the 
close,  when  we  should  be  employed  in-  adorn 
ing  the  thought.  It  makes  a  poet  giddy  with 
turning  in  a  space  too  narrow  for  his  imagina 
tion."  ' 

Dryden  himself,  as  was  not  always  the  case 
with  him,  was  well  satisfied  with  his  work.  He 
calls  it  his  best  hitherto,  and  attributes  his  suc 
cess  to  the  excellence  of  his  subject,  "  incom 
parably  the  best  he  had  ever  had,  excepting  only 
the  Royal  Family"  The  first  part  is  devoted  to 
the  Dutch  war ;  the  last  to  the  fire  of  London. 
The  martial  half  is  infinitely  the  better  of  the 
two.  He  altogether  surpasses  his  model,  Dave- 
nant.  If  his  poem  lack  the  gravity  of  thought 
attained  by  a  few  stanzas  of  "  Gondibert,"  it  is 
vastly  superior  in  life,  in  picturesqueness,  in  the 
energy  of  single  lines,  and,  above  all,  in  imagi 
nation.  Few  men  have  read  "  Gondibert/'  and 
almost  every  one  speaks  of  it,  as  commonly  of 
the  dead,  with  a  certain  subdued  respect.  And 
it  deserves  respect  as  an  honest  effort  to  bring 
poetry  back  to  its  highest  office  in  the  ideal 
treatment  of  life.  Davenant  emulated  Spenser, 
and  if  his  poem  had-  been  as  good  as  his  pre 
face,  it  could  still  be  read  in  another  spirit  than 

1  Essay  on  Satire.  What  he  has  said  just  before  this  about 
Butler  is  worth  noting.  Butler  had  had  a  chief  hand  in  the 
Rehearsal,  but  Dryden  had  no  grudges  where  the  question 
was  of  giving  its  just  praise  to  merit. 


94  DRYDEN 

that  of  investigation.  As  it  is,  it  always  reminds 
me  of  Goldsmith's  famous  verse.  It  is  remote, 
unfriendly,  solitary,  and,  above  all,  slow.  Its 
shining  passages,  for  there  are  such,  remind  one 
of  distress-rockets  sent  up  at  intervals  from  a 
ship  just  about  to  founder,  and  sadden  rather 
than  cheer.1 

The  first  part  of  the  "  Annus  Mirabilis  "  is 
by  no  means  clear  of  the  false  taste  of  the  time,2 
though  it  has  some  of  Dryden's  manliest  verses 
and  happiest  comparisons,  always  his  two  dis 
tinguishing  merits.  Here,  as  almost  everywhere 
else  in  Dryden,  measuring  him  merely  as  poet, 
we  recall  what  he,  with  pathetic  pride,  says  of 
himself  in  the  prologue  to  "  Aurengzebe  ":  — 

"  Let  him  retire,  betwixt  two  ages  cast, 
The  first  of  this,  the  hindmost  of  the  last." 

1  The  conclusion  of  the  second  canto  of  Book  Third  is  the 
best  continuously  fine  passage.     Dryden's  poem  has  nowhere 
so  much  meaning  in  so  small  space  as  Davenant,  when   he 
says  of  the  sense  of  honor  that,  — 

"Like  Power,  it  grows  to  nothing,  growing  less." 

Davenant  took  the  hint  of  the  stanza  from  Sir  John  Davies. 
Wyatt  first  used  it,  so  far  as  I  know,  in  English. 

2  Perhaps  there  is  no  better  lecture  on  the  prevailing  vices 
of  style  and  thought  (if  thought  this  frothy  ferment  of  the 
mind  may  be  called)   than  in  Cotton   Mather's   Magnalia. 
For  Mather,  like  a  true  provincial,  appropriates  only  the  man 
nerism,  and,  as  is  usual  in  such  cases,  betrays  all  its  weakness 
by  the  unconscious  parody  of  exaggeration. 


DRYDEN  95 

What  can  be  worse  than  what  he  says  of 
comets  ?  — 

"  Whether  they  unctuous  exhalations  are 
Fired  by  the  sun,  or  seeming  so  alone, 
Or  each  some  more  remote  and  slippery  star 
Which  loses  footing  when  to  mortals  shown." 

Or  than  this,  of  the  destruction  of  the  Dutch 
India  ships  ?  — 

"Amidst  whole  heaps  of  spices  lights  a  ball, 
And  now  their  odors  armed  against  them  fly; 
Some  preciously  by  shattered  porcelain  fall, 
And  some  by  aromatic  splinters  die." 

Dear  Dr.  Johnson  had  his  doubts  about  Shake 
speare,  but  here  at  least  was  poetry  !  This -is  one 
of  the  quatrains  which  he  pronounces  "  worthy 
of  our  author."  ' 

But  Dryden  himself  has  said  that  "  a  man 
who  is  resolved  to  praise  an  author  with  any 
appearance  of  justice  must  be  sure  to  take  him 
on  the  strongest  side,  and  where  he  is  least  liable 

1  The  Doctor  was  a  capital  judge  of  the  substantial  value  of 
the  goods  he  handled,  but  his  judgment  always  seems  that  of  the 
thumb  and  forefinger.  For  the  shades,  the  disposition  of  colors, 
the  beauty  of  the  figures,  he  has  as  good  as  no  sense  whatever. 
The  critical  parts  of  his  Life  of  Dryden  seem  to  me  the  best 
of  his  writing  in  this  kind.  There  is  little  to  be  gleaned  after 
him.  He  had  studied  his  author,  which  he  seldom  did,  and 
his  criticism  is  sympathetic,  a  thing  still  rarer  with  him.  As 
illustrative  of  his  own  habits,  his  remarks  on  Dry  den's  reading 
are  curious. 


96  DRYDEN 

to  exceptions."  This  is  true  also  of  one  who 
wishes  to  measure  an  author  fairly,  for  the  higher 
wisdom  of  criticism  lies  in  the  capacity  to  ad 
mire. 

Leser,  wie  gefall  ich  dir? 
Leser,  wie  gefallst  du  mir?  — 

are  both  fair  questions,  the  answer  to  the  first 
being  more  often  involved  in  that  to  the  second 
than  is  sometimes  thought.  The  poet  in  Dry- 
den  was  never  more  fully  revealed  than  in  such 
verses  as  these  :  — 

"  And  threatening  France,  placed  like  a  painted  Jove,1 
Kept  idle  thunder  in  his  lifted  hand  "; 

"  Silent  in  smoke  of  cannon  they  come  on"; 

1  Perhaps  the  hint  was  given  by  a  phrase  of  Corneille, 
monarque  en  peinture.  Dryden  seldom  borrows,  unless  from 
Shakespeare,  without  improving,  and  he  borrowed  a  great 
deal.  Thus  in  Don  Sebastian  (of  suicide):  — 

"  Brutus  and  Cato  might  discharge  their  souls, 
And  give  them  furloughs  for  the  other  world  j 
But  we,  like  sentries,  are  obliged  to  stand 
In  starless  nights  and  wait  the  appointed  hour." 

The  thought  is  Cicero's,  but  how  it  is  intensified  by  the  "  star 
less  nights"!  Dryden,  I  suspect,  got  it  from  his  favorite, 
Montaigne,  who  says,  «'  Que  nous  ne  pouvons  abandonner 
cette  garnison  du  monde,  sans  le  commandement  exprez  de 
celuy  qui  nous  y  a  mis."  (Lib.  ii.  chap.  3.)  In  the  same 
play,  by  a  very  Drydenish  verse,  he  gives  new  force  to  an  old 
comparison  :  — 

"  And  I  should  break  through  laws  divine  and  human, 
And  think  'em  cobwebs  spread  for  little  man, 
Which  all  the  bulky  herd  of  Nature  breakt," 


DRYDEN  97 

te  And  his  loud  guns  speak  thick,  like  angry  men  "; 

"  The  vigorous  seaman  every  port-hole  plies, 
And  adds  his  heart  to  every  gun  he  fires  "; 

'«  And,  though  to  me  unknown,  they  sure  fought  well, 
Whom  Rupert  led,  and  who  were  British  born." 

This  is  masculine  writing,  and  yet  it  must  be 
said  that  there  is  scarcely  a  quatrain  in  which 
the  rhyme  does  not  trip  him  into  a  platitude, 
and  there  are  too  many  swaggering  with  that 
expression  forte  d'un  sentiment  faible  which  Vol 
taire  condemns  in  Corneille, —  a  temptation  to 
which  Dryden  always  lay  too  invitingly  open. 
But  there  are  passages  higher  in  kind  than  any  I 
have  cited,  because  they  show  imagination.  Such 
are  the  verses  in  which  he  describes  the  dreams 
of  the  disheartened  enemy:  — 

"  In  dreams  they  fearful  precipices  tread, 

Or,  shipwrecked,  labor  to  some  distant  shore, 
Or  in  dark  churches  walk  among  the  dead  ";  — 

and  those  in  which  he  recalls  glorious  memories, 
and  sees  where 

"The  mighty  ghosts  of  our  great  Harries  rose, 
And  armed  Edwards  looked  with  anxious  eyes." 

A  few  verses,  like  the  pleasantly  alliterative 
one  in  which  he  makes  the  spider,  "  from  the 
silent  ambush  of  his  den,"  "  feel  far  off  the 
trembling  of  his  thread,"  show  that  he  was 
beginning  to  study  the  niceties  of  verse,  instead 
of  trusting  wholly  to  what  he  would  have  called 


98  DRYDEN 

his  natural  foitgue.  On  the  whole,  this  part  of 
the  poem  is  very  good  war  poetry,  as  war  poetry 
goes  (for  there  is  but  one  first-rate  poem  of  the 
kind  in  English,  —  short,  national,  eager  as  if 
the  writer  were  personally  engaged,  with  the 
rapid  metre  of  a  drum  beating  the  charge, — and 
that  is  Dray  ton's  "  Battle  of  Agincourt  "  '),  but 
it  shows  more  study  of  Lucan  than  of  Virgil, 
and  for  a  long  time  yet  we  shall  find  Dryden 
bewildered  by  bad  models.  He  is  always  imi 
tating — no,  that  is  not  the  word,  always  emulat 
ing —  somebody  in  his  more  strictly  poetical 
attempts,  for  in  that  direction  he  always  needed 
some  external  impulse  to  set  his  mind  in  motion. 
This  is  more  or  less  true  of  all  authors ;  nor 
does  it  detract  from  their  originality,  which  de 
pends  wholly  on  their  being  able  so  far  to  for 
get  themselves  as  to  let  something  of  themselves 
slip  into  what  they  write.2  In  his  prologue  to 
"  Albumazar "  Dryden  himself  says  of  Ben 
Jonson, — 

"  But  Ben  made  nobly  his  \vhat  he  did  mould, 
What  was  another's  lead  becomes  his  gold." 

The  wise  will  call  mould  as  good  a  euphemism 

1  Not  his  solemn  historical   droning  under   that   title,  but 
addressed  "To  the  Cambrio-Britons  on  their  harp." 

2  "  Les  poetes  euxmemes  s'animent  et  s'echauffent   par  la 
lecture  des  autres  poetes.     Messieurs  de  Malherbe,  Corneille, 
etc.,  se  disposoient  au  travail  par  la  lecture  des  poetes  qui 
etoient  de  leur  gout."    (Vigneul-Marvilliana,  i.  64,  65.) 


DRYDEN  99 

as  convey  I  Of  absolute  originality  we  will  not 
speak  till  authors  are  raised  by  some  Deucalion- 
and-Pyrrha  process ;  and  even  then  our  faith 
would  be  small,  for  writers  who  have  no  past 
are  pretty  sure  of  having  no  future.  Dryden,  at 
any  rate,  always  had  to  have  his  copy  set  him 
at  the  top  of  the  page,  and  wrote  ill  or  well 
accordingly.  His  mind  (somewhat  solid  for  a 
poet)  warmed  slowly,  but,  once  fairly  heated 
through,  he  had  more  of  that  good  luck  of  self- 
oblivion  than  most  men.  He  certainly  gave  even 
a  liberal  interpretation  to  Moliere's  rule  of  tak 
ing  his  own  property  wherever  he  found  it, 
though  he  sometimes  blundered  awkwardly 
about  what  was  properly  his ;  but  in  literature, 
it  should  be  remembered, a  thing  always  becomes 
his  at  last  who  says  it  best,  and  thus  makes  it  his 
own.1 

1  For  example,  Waller  had  said, — 

"  Others  may  use  the  ocean  as  their  road, 
Only  the  English  make  it  their  abode  ,• 

We  tread  on  billoivs  'with  a  steady  foot^ — 

long  before  Campbell.  Campbell  helps  himself  to  both 
thoughts,  enlivens  them  into 

"  Her  march  is  o'er  the  mountain  wave, 
Her  home  is  on  the  deep,"  — 

and  they  are  his  forevermore.  His  "leviathans  afloat"  he 
lifted  from  the  A?inus  Mirabilis ;  but  in  what  court  could 
Dryden  sue  ?  Again,  Waller  in  another  poem  calls  the  Duke 
of  York's  flag 

"  His  dreadful  sweamer,  like  a  comet's  hair"j  — 


TOO  DRYDEN 

Mr.  Savage  Landor  once  told  me  that  he  said 
to  Wordsworth  :  "  Mr.  Wordsworth,  a  man  may 
mix  poetry  with  prose  as  much  as  he  pleases, 
and  it  will  only  elevate  and  enliven;  but  the 
moment  he  mixes  a  particle  of  prose  with  his 
poetry,  it  precipitates  the  whole."  Wordsworth, 
he  added,  never  forgave  him.  The  always  hasty 
Dryden,  as  I  think  I  have  already  said,  was 
liable,  like  a  careless  apothecary's  'prentice,  to 
make  the  same  confusion  of  ingredients,  espe 
cially  in  the  more  mischievous  way.  I  cannot 
leave  the  "  Annus  Mirabilis  "  without  giving  an 
example  of  this.  Describing  the  Dutch  prizes, 
rather  like  an  auctioneer  than  a  poet,  he  says 
that 

"  Some  English  wool,  vexed  in  a  Belgian  loom, 
And  into  cloth  of  spongy  softness  made, 
Did  into  France  or  colder  Denmark  doom, 
To  ruin  with  worse  ware  our  staple  trade.** 

One  might  fancy  this  written  by  the  secretary 
of  a  board  of  trade  in  an  unguarded  moment; 

and  this,  I  believe,  is  the  first  application  of  the  celestial  por 
tent  to  this  particular  comparison.  Yet  Milton's  "  imperial 
ensign  *'  waves  defiant  behind  his  impregnable  lines,  and  even 
Campbell  flaunts  his  "  meteor  flag"  in  Waller's  face.  Gray's 
bard  might  be  sent  to  the  lock-up,  but  even  he  would  find  bail. 

"  C'est  imirpr  quelqu'un  que  de  planter  des  choux." 

"The  lyrical  cry  "  which  has  lately  become  as  itcratively 
tedious  in  the  fields  of  criticism  as  that  of  the  cicala  in  those 
of  Italy  may  perhaps  be  traced  to  the  "  lyric-liring  cries  "  of 
Sidney's  Arcadia, 


DRYDEN  101 

but  we  should  remember  that  the  poem  is  dedi 
cated  to  the  city  of  London.  The  depreciation 
of  the  rival  fabrics  is  exquisite  ;  and  Dry  den,  the 
most  English  of  our  poets,  would  not  be  so 
thoroughly  English  if  he  had  not  in  him  some 
fibre  of  la  nation  boutiquiere.  Let  us  now  see 
how  he  succeeds  in  attempting  to  infuse  science 
(the  most  obstinately  prosy  material)  with  poetry. 
Speaking  of  "  a  more  exact  knowledge  of  the 
longitudes,"  as  he  explains  in  a  note,  he  tells 
us  that,  — 

"  Then  we  upon  our  globe's  last  verge  shall  go, 
And  view  the  ocean  leaning  on  the  sky; 
From  thence  our  rolling  neighbors  we  shall  know, 
And  on  the  lunar  world  securely  pry." 

Dr.  Johnson  confesses  that  he  does  not  under 
stand  this.  Why  should  he,  when  it  is  plain  that 
Dryden  was  wholly  in  the  dark  himself?  To 
understand  it  is  none  of  my  business,  but  I  con 
fess  that  it  interests  me  as  an  Americanism.  We 
have  hitherto  been  credited  as  the  inventors  of 
the  "  jumping-off  place  "  at  the  extreme  western 
verge  of  the  world.  But  Dryden  was  beforehand 
with  us.  Though  he  doubtless  knew  that  the 
earth  was  a  sphere  (and  perhaps  that  it  was  flat 
tened  at  the  poles),  it  was  always  a  flat  surface 
in  his  fancy.  In  his  "  Amphitryon, "  he  makes 
Alcmena  say  :  — 

"  No,  I  would  fly  thee  to  the  ridge  of  earth, 
And  leap  the  precipice  to  'scape  thy  sight." 


loi  DRYDEN 

And  in  his  cc  Spanish  Friar,"  Lorenzo  says  to 
Elvira  that  they  "  will  travel  together  to  the 
ridge  of  the  world,  and  then  drop  together  into 
the  next."  It  is  idle  for  us  poor  Yankees  to  hope 
that  we  can  invent  anything.  To  say  sooth,  if 
Dryden  had  left  nothing  behind  him  but  the 
"  Annus  Mirabilis,"  he  might  have  served  as 
a  type  of  the  kind  of  poet  America  would  have 
produced  by  the  biggest-river-and-tallest-moun- 
tain  recipe,  —  longitude  and  latitude  in  plenty, 
with  marks  of  culture  scattered  here  and  there 
like  the  carets  on  a  proof-sheet. 

It  is  now  time  to  say  something  of  Dryden 
as  a  dramatist.  In  the  thirty-two  years  between 
1662  and  1694  he  produced  twenty-five  plays, 
and  assisted  Lee  in  two.  I  have  hinted  that  it 
took  Dryden  longer  than  most  men  to  find  the 
true  bent  of  his  genius.  On  a  superficial  view, 
he  might  almost  seem  to  confirm  that  theory, 
maintained  by  Johnson,  among  others,  that  gen 
ius  was  nothing  more  than  great  intellectual  power 
exercised  persistently  in  some  particular  direction 
which  chance  decided,  so  that  it  lay  in  circum 
stance  merely  whether  a  man  should  turn  out  a 
Shakespeare  or  a  Newton.  But  when  we  come 
to  compare  what  he  wrote,  regardless  of  Mi 
nerva's  averted  face,  with  the  spontaneous  pro 
duction  of  his  happier  muse,  we  shall  be  inclined 
to  think  his  example  one  of  the  strongest  cases 
against  the  theory  in  question.  He  began  his 


DRYDEN  103 

dramatic  career,  as  usual,  by  rowing  against  the 
strong  current  of  his  nature,  and  pulled  only  the 
more  doggedly  the  more  he  felt  himself  swept 
down  the  stream.  His  first  attempt  was  at  com 
edy,  and,  though  his  earliest  piece  of  that  kind 
(the  "Wild  Gallant,"  1663)  utterly  failed,  he 
wrote  eight  others  afterwards.  On  the  2^d  Feb- 

D  «J 

ruary,  1663,  Pepys  writes  in  his  diary:  "To 
Court,  and  there  saw  the  'Wild  Gallant '  per 
formed  by  the  king's  house  ;  but  it  was  ill  acted, 
and  the  play  so  poor  a  thing  as  I  never  saw  in  my 
life  almost,  and  so  little  answering  the  name,  that, 
from  the  beginning  to  the  end,  I  could  not,  nor 
can  at  this  time,  tell  certainly  which  was  the  Wild 
Gallant.  The  king  did  not  seem  pleased  at  all 
the  whole  play,  nor  anybody  else."  After  some 
alteration,  it  was  revived  with  more  success.  On 
its  publication  in  1669  Dryden  honestly  admit 
ted  its  former  failure,  though  with  a  kind  of 
salvo  for  his  self-love.  "  I  made  the  town  my 
judges,  and  the  greater  part  condemned  it.  After 
which  I  do  not  think  it  my  concernment  to 
defend  it  with  the  ordinary  zeal  of  a  poet  for  his 
decried  poem,  though  Corneille  is  more  resolute 
in  his  preface  before  c  Pertharite/  x  which  was 
condemned  more  universally  than  this.  .  .  .  Yet 
it  was  received  at  Court,  and  was  more  than  once 

1  Corneille's  tragedy  of  Pertharite  was  acted  unsuccess 
fully  in  1659.  Racine  made  free  use  of  it  in  his  more  fortu 
nate  Andromaque. 


io4  DRYDEN 

the  divertisement  of  his  Majesty,  by  his  own 
command."  Pepys  lets  us  amusingly  behind 
the  scenes  in  the  matter  of  his  Majesty's  diver 
tisement.  Dryden  does  not  seem  to  see  that  in 
the  condemnation  of  something  meant  to  amuse 
the  public  there  can  be  no  question  of  degree. 
To  fail  at  all  is  to  fail  utterly. 

"  Tous  les  genres  sont  permis,  hors  le  genre  cnnuveux." 

In  the  reading,  at  least,  all  Dry  den's  comic 
writing  for  the  stage  must  be  ranked  with  the 
latter  class.  He  himself  would  fain  make  an 
exception  of  the  "  Spanish  Friar,"  but  I  confess 
that  I  rather  wonder  at  than  envy  those  who 
can  be  amused  by  it.  His  comedies  lack  every 
thing  that  a  comedy  should  have, —  lightness, 
quickness  of  transition,  unexpectedness  of  inci 
dent,  easy  cleverness  of  dialogue,  and  humorous 
contrast  of  character  brought  out  by  identity 
of  situation.  The  comic  parts  of  the  "  Maiden 
Queen "  seem  to  me  Dryden's  best,  but  the 
merit  even  of  these  is  Shakespeare's,  and  there 
is  little  choice  where  even  the  best  is  only  tol 
erable.  The  common  quality,  however,  of  ail 
Dryden's  comedies  is  their  nastiness,  the  more 
remarkable  because  we  have  ample  evidence 
that  he  was  a  man  of  modest  conversation. 
Pepys,  who  was  by  no  means  squeamish  (for 
he  found  "  Sir  Martin  Marall  "  "  the  most  en 
tire  piece  of  mirth  .  .  .  that  certainly  ever  was 
writ  .  .  .  very  good  wit  therein,  not  fooling  "), 


DRYDEN  105 

writes  in  his  diary  of  the  I9th  June,  1668: 
"  My  wife  and  Deb  to  the  king's  playhouse 
to-day,  thinking  to  spy  me  there,  and  saw  the 
new  play  £  Evening  Love,'  of  Dryden's,  which, 
though  the  world  commends,  she  likes  not." 
The  next  day  he  saw  it  himself,  "  and  do  not 
like  it,  it  being  very  smutty,  and  nothing  so 
good  as  the  c  Maiden  Queen  '  or  the  '  Indian 
Emperor  '  of  Dryden's  making.  /  was  troubled 
at  it."  On  the  22d  he  adds  :  "  Calling  this  day 
at  Herringman's,1  he  tells  me  Dryden  do  him 
self  call  it  but  a  fifth-rate  play."  This  was  no 
doubt  true,  and  yet,  though  Dryden  in  his  pre 
face  to  the  play  says,  "  I  confess  I  have  given 
[yielded]  too  much  to  the  people  in  it,  and  am 
ashamed  for  them  as  well  as  for  myself,  that  I 
have  pleased  them  at  so  cheap  a  rate,"  he  takes 
care  to  add,  "  not  that  there  is  anything  here 
that  I  would  not  defend  to  an  ill-natured  judge." 
The  plot  was  from  Calderon,  and  the  author, 
rebutting  the  charge  of  plagiarism,  tells  us  that 
the  king  ("without  whose  command  they  should 
no  longer  be  troubled  with  anything  of  mine") 
had  already  answered  for  him  by  saying,  "  that 
he  only  desired  that  they  who  accused  me  of 
theft  would  always  steal  him  plays  like  mine."  2 

1  Dryden's  publisher. 

2  It  is  curious  how  good  things  repeat  themselves.    When 
General  Grant  was  accused  of  drinking  too  much,  Mr.  Lin 
coln  drily  replied  that  "he  wished  all  our  generals  might  get 
hold  of  the  same  whiskey.'1 


io6  DRYDEN 

Of  the  morals  of  the  play  he  has  not  a  word, 
nor  do  I  believe  that  he  was  conscious  of  any 
harm  in  them  till  he  was  attacked  by  Collier, 
and  then  (with  some  protest  against  what  he 
considers  the  undue  severity  of  his  censor) 
he  had  the  manliness  to  confess  that  he  had 
done  wrong.  "It  becomes  me  not  to  draw  my 
pen  in  the  defence  of  a  bad  cause,  when  I  have 
so  often  drawn  it  for  a  good  one."  '  And  in 
a  letter  to  his  correspondent,  Mrs.  Thomas, 
written  only  a  few  weeks  before  his  death,  warn 
ing  her  against  the  example  of  Mrs.  Behn,  he 
says,  with  remorseful  sincerity  :  "  I  confess  I  am 
the  last  man  in  the  world  who  ought  in  justice 
to  arraign  her,  who  have  been  myself  too  much 
a  libertine  in  most  of  my  poems,  which  I  should 
be  well  contented  I  had  time  either  to  purge 
or  to  see  them  fairly  burned."  Congreve  was 
less  patient,and  even  Dryden,in  the  last  epilogue 
he  ever  wrote,  attempts  an  excuse  :  — 

"  Perhaps  the  Parson  stretched  a  point  too  far, 
When  with  our  Theatres  he  waged  a  war; 
He  tells  you  that  this  very  moral  age 
Received  the  first  infection  from  the  Stage, 
But  sure  a  banished  Court,  with  lewdness  fraught, 
The  seeds  of  open  vice  returning  brought. 

Whitehall  the  naked  Venus  first  revealed, 
Who,  standing,  as  at  Cyprus,  in  her  shrine, 
The  strumpet  was  adored  with  rites  divine. 

1   Preface  to  the  Fables. 


107 

The  poets,  who  must  live  by  Courts  or  starve, 
Were  proud  so  good  a  Government  to  serve, 
And,  mixing  with  buffoons  and  pimps  profane, 
Tainted  the  Stage  for  some  small  snip  of  gain." 

Dryden  least  of  all  men  should  have  stooped 
to  this  palliation,  for  he  had,  not  without  jus 
tice,  said  of  himself:  "  The  same  parts  and 
application  which  have  made  me  a  poet  might 
have  raised  me  to  any  honors  of  the  gown." 
Milton  and  Marvell  neither  lived  by  the  Court, 
nor  starved.  Charles  Lamb  most  ingeniously 
defends  the  Comedy  of  the  Restoration  as  "  the 
sanctuary  and  quiet  Alsatia  of  hunted  casuistry," 
where  there  was  no  pretence  of  representing 
a  real  world.1  But  this  was  certainly  not  so. 
Dryden  again  and  again  boasts  of  the  superior  \ 
advantage  which  his  age  had  over  that  of  the 
elder  dramatists,  in  painting  polite  life,  and 
attributes  it  to  a  greater  freedom  of  intercourse 
between  the  poets  and  the  frequenters  of  the 
Court.2  We  shall  be  less  surprised  at  the  kind 
of  refinement  upon  which  Dryden  congratulated 
himself,  when  we  learn  (from  the  dedication  of 
"  Marriage  a  la  Mode ")  that  the  Earl  of 
Rochester  was  its  exemplar :  "  The  best  comic 

1  I  interpret  some  otherwise   ambiguous  passages   in  this 
charming  and  acute   essay  by  its  title:   "  On   the  artificial 
comedy  of  the  last  century." 

2  See  especially  his  defence  of  the  epilogue  to  the  Second 
Part  of  the  Conquest  of  Granada  (1672). 


io8  DRYDEN 

writers  of  our  age  will  join  with  me  to  acknow 
ledge  that  they  have  copied  the  gallantries  of 
Courts,  the  delicacy  of  expression,  and  the  de 
cencies  of  behavior  from  your  Lordship."  In 
judging  Dryden,  it  should  be  borne  in  mind 
that  for  some  years  he  was  under  contract  to 
deliver  three  plays  a  year,  a  kind  of  bond  to 
which  no  man  should  subject  his  brain  who  has 
a  decent  respect  for  the  quality  of  its  products. 
We  should  remember,  too,  that  in  his  day  man 
ners  meant  what  we  call  morals,  that  custom 
always  makes  a  larger  part  of  virtue  among 
average  men  than  they  are  quite  aware,  and  that 
the  reaction  from  an  outward  conformity  which 
had  no  root  in  inward  faith  may  for  a  time  have 
given  to  the  frank  expression  of  laxity  an  air 
of  honesty  that  made  it  seem  almost  refreshing. 
There  is  no  such  hotbed  for  excess  of  license 
as  excess  of  restraint,  and  the  arrogant  fanati 
cism  of  a  single  virtue  is  apt  to  make  men  sus 
picious  of  tyranny  in  all  the  rest.  But  the  riot 
of  emancipation  could  not  last  long,  for  the 
more  tolerant  society  is  of  private  vice,  the  more 
exacting  will  it  be  of  public  decorum,  that  ex 
cellent  thing,  so  often  the  plausible  substitute 
for  things  more  excellent.  By  1678  the  public 
mind  had  so  far  recovered  its  tone  that  Dry- 
den's  comedy  of  "  Limberham  "  was  barely 
tolerated  for  three  nights.  I  will  let  the  man 
who  looked  at  human  nature  from  more  sides, 


DRYDEN  109 

and  therefore  judged  it  more  gently  than  any 
other,  give  the  only  excuse  possible  for  Dry- 
den  :  — 

"  Men's  judgments  are 

A  parcel  of  their  fortunes,  and  things  outward 
Do  draw  the  inward  quality  after  them 
To  suffer  all  alike." 

Dryden's  own  apology  only  makes  matters 
worse  for  him  by  showing  that  he  committed  his 
offences  with  his  eyes  wide  open,  and  that  he 
wrote  comedies  so  wholly  in  despite  of  nature 
as  never  to  deviate  into  the  comic.  Failing  as 
clown,  he  did  not  scruple  to  take  on  himself  the 
office  of  Chiffinch  to  the  palled  appetite  of  the' 
public.  "  For  I  confess  my  chief  endeavours 
are  to  delight  the  age  in  which  I  live.  If  the 
humour  of  this  be  for  low  comedy,  small  acci 
dents,  and  raillery,  I  will  force  my  genius  to  obey 
it,  though  with  more  reputation  I  could  write  in 
verse.  I  know  I  am  not  so  fitted  by  nature  to 
write  comedy ;  I  want  that  gayety  of  humour 
which  is  requisite  to  it.  My  conversation  Is  slow 
and  dull,  my  humour  saturnine  and  reserved : 
In  short,  I  am  none  of  those  who  endeavour  to 
break  jests  in  company  or  make  repartees.  So 
that  those  who  decry  my  comedies  do  me  no 
injury,  except  it  be  in  point  of  profit:  Reputa 
tion  in  them  is  the  last  thing  to  which  I  shall 
pretend."  l  For  my  own  part,  though  I  have 
1  Defence  of  an  Essay  on  Dramatick  Poesy, 


no  DRYDEN 

been  forced  to  hold  my  nose  in  picking  my  way 
through  these  ordures  of  Dryden,  I  am  free  to 
say  that  I  think  them  farjess^morally  mischiev 
ous  than  that  corps-de-ballet  literature  in  which 
the  most  animal  of  the  passions  is  made  more 
temptingly  naked  by  a  veil  of  French  gauze. 
Nor  does  Dryden's  lewdness  leave  such  a  reek 
in  the  mind  as  the  filthy  cynicism  of  Swift,  who 
delighted  to  uncover  the  nakedness  of  our  com 
mon  mother. 

It  is  pleasant  to  follow  Dryden  into  the  more 
congenial  region  of  heroic  plays,  though  here 
also  we  find  him  making  a  false  start.  Anxious 
to  please  the  king,1  and  so  able  a  reasoner  as  to 
convince  even  himself  of  the  justice  of  whatever 
cause  he  argued,  he  not  only  wrote  tragedies  in 
the  French  style,  but  defended  his  practice  in 
an  essay  which  is  by  far  the  most  delightful  re 
production  of  the  classic  dialogue  ever  written 
in  English.  Eugenius  (Lord  Buckhurst),  Lisi- 
deius  (Sir  Charles  Sidley),  Crites  (Sir  R.  How 
ard),  and  Neander  (Dryden)  are  the  four  par 
takers  in  the  debate.  The  comparative  merits 
of  ancients  and  moderns,  of  the  Shakespearian 
and  contemporary  drama,  of  rhyme  and  blank 
verse,  the  value  of  the  three  (supposed)  Aristo- 

T  "  The  favor  which  heroick  plays  have  lately  found  upon 
our  theatres  has  been  wholly  derived  to  them  from  the  coun 
tenance  and  approbation  they  have  received  at  Court. ' '  (  Dedi 
cation  of  Indian  Emperor  to  Duchess  of  Monmouth. ) 


DRYDEN 


in 


telian  unities,  are  the  main  topics  discussed.  The 
tone  of  the  discussion  is  admirable,  midway 
between  bookishness  and  talk,  and  the  fairness 
with  which  each  side  of  the  argument  is  treated 
shows  the  breadth  of  Dryden's  mind  perhaps 
better  than  any  other  one  piece  of  his  writing. 
There  are  no  men  of  straw  set  up  to  be  knocked 
down  again,  as  there  commonly  are  in  debates 
conducted  upon  this  plan.  The  <c  Defence  "  of 
the  Essay  is  to  be  taken  as  a  supplement  to 
Neander's  share  in  it,  as  well  as  many  scattered 
passages  in  subsequent  prefaces  and  dedications. 
All  the  interlocutors  agree  that  "  the  sweetness 
of  English  verse  was  never  understood  or  prac 
tised  by  our  fathers,"  and  that  "  our  poesy  is 
much  improved  by  the  happiness  of  some  writers 
yet  living,  who  first  taught  us  to  mould  our 
thoughts  into  easy  and  significant  words,  to 
retrench  the  superfluities  of  expression,  and 
to  make  our  rhyme  so  properly  a  part  of  the 
verse  that  it  should  never  mislead  the  sense, 
but  itself  be  led  and  governed  by  it."  In  another 
place  he  shows  that  by  "  living  writers "  he 
meant  Waller  and  Denham.  "  Rhyme  has  all 
the  advantages  of  prose  besides  its  own.  But 
the  excellence  and  dignity  of  it  were  never  fully 
known  till  Mr.  Waller  taught  it :  he  first  made 
writing  easily  an  art ;  first  showed  us  to  conclude 
the  sense,  most  commonly  in  distiches,  which 
in  the  verse  before  him  runs  on  for  so  many  lines 


\ 

112  DRYDEN 

together  that  the  reader  is  out  of  breath  to  over 
take  it."  Dryden  afterwards  changed  his  mind, 
and  one  of  the  excellences  of  his  own  rhymed 
verse  is,  that  his  sense  is  too  ample  to  be  con 
cluded  by  the  distich.  Rhyme  had  been  cen 
sured  as  unnatural  in  dialogue ;  but  Dryden 
replies  that  it  is  no  more  so  than  blank  verse, 
since  no  man  talks  any  kind  of  verse  in  real 
life.  But  the  argument  for  rhyme  is  of  another 
kind.  "  I  am  satisfied  if  it  cause  delight,  for 
delight  is  the  chief  if  not  the  only  end  of  poesy 
[he  should  have  said  means\\  instruction  can  be 
admitted  but  in  the  second  place,  for  poesy  only 
instructs  as  it  delights.  .  .  .  The  converse,  there 
fore,  which  a  poet  is  to  imitate  must  be  height 
ened  with  all  the  arts  and  ornaments  of  poesy, 
and  must  be  such  as,  strictly  considered,  could 
never  be  supposed  spoken  by  any  without  pre 
meditation.  .  .  .  Thus  prose,  though  the  right 
ful  prince,  yet  is  by  common  consent  deposed 
as  too  weak  for  the  government  of  serious  plays, 
and,  he  failing,  there  now  start  up  two  competi 
tors ;  one  the  nearer  in  blood,  which  is  blank 
verse ;  the  other  more  fit  for  the  ends  of  gov 
ernment,  which  is  rhyme.  Blank  verse  is,  indeed, 
the  nearer  prose,  but  he  is  blemished  with  the 
weakness  of  his  predecessor.  Rhyme  (for  I  will 
deal  clearly)  has  somewhat  of  the  usurper  in 
him ;  but  he  is  brave  and  generous  and  his 

1   Dedication  of  Rival  Ladies. 


DRYDEN  113 

dominion  pleasing."  '  To  the  objection  that  the 
difficulties  of  rhyme  will  lead  to  circumlocution, 
he  answers  in  substance,  that  a  good  poet  will 
know  how  to  avoid  them. 

It  is  curious  how  long  the  superstition  that 
Waller  was  the  refiner  of  English  verse  has 
prevailed  since  Dryden  first  gave  it  vogue.  He 
was  a  very  poor  poet  and  a  purely  mechanical 
versifier.  He  has  lived  mainly  on  the  credit  of 
his  "  Rose,"  of  his  "  Girdle  "  (soiled  with  a  vile 
pun),  and  of  a  single  couplet, — 

"  The  soul's  dark  cottage,  battered  and  decayed, 

Lets  in  new  light  through  chinks  that  Time  hath  made,"  — 

in  which  the  melody  alone  belongs  to  him,  and 
the  conceit,  such  as  it  is,  to  Samuel  Daniel,  who 
said,  long  before,  that  the  body's 

"  Walls,  grown  thin,  permit  the  mind 
To  look  out  thorough  and  his  frailty  find." 

Waller  has  made  worse  nonsense  of  it  in  the 
transfusion.  It  might  seem  that  Ben  Jonson 
had  a  prophetic  foreboding  of  him  when  he 
wrote  :  "  Others  there  are  that  have  no  compo 
sition  at  all,  but  a  kind  of  tuning  and  rhyming 
fall,  in  what  they  write.  It  runs  and  slides  and 
only  makes  a  sound.  Women's  poets  they  are 
called,  as  you  have  women's  tailors. 

1  Defence  of  the  Essay.  Dryden,  in  the  happiness  of  his  illus 
trative  comparisons,  is  almost  pnmatched.  Like  himself,  they 
occupy  a  middle  ground  between  poetry  and  prose,  —  they 
are  a  cross  between  metaphor  and  simile.  ^ 


,,4  DRYDEN 

•«  They  write  a  verse  as  smooth,  as  soft,  as  cream 
In  which  there  is  no  torrent,  nor  scarce  stream. 

You  may  sound  these  wits  and  find  the  depth 
of  them  with  your  middle-finger."1  It  seems 
to  have  been  taken  for  granted  by  Waller,  as 
afterwards  by  Dryden,  that  our  elder  poets  be 
stowed  no  thought  upon  their  verse.  "  Waller 
was  smooth,"  but  unhappily  he  was  also  flat, 
and  his  importation  of  the  French  theory  of  the 
couplet  as  a  kind  of  thought-coop  did  nothing 
but  mischief.2  He  never  compassed  even  a 
smoothness  approaching  this  description  of  a 
nightingale's  song  by  a  third-rate  poet  of  the 
earlier  school,  — 

"  Trails  her  plain  ditty  in  one  long-spun  note 
Through  the  sleek  passage  of  her  open  throat, 
A  clear,  un wrinkled  song,*'  — 

one  of  whose  beauties  is  its  running  over  into 
the  third  verse.  Those  poets  indeed 

"  Felt  music's  pulse  in  all  her  arteries  ";  — 

1  Discoveries. 

2  What  a  wretched  rhymer  he  could  be  we  may  see  in  his 
alteration  of  the  Maid* s  Tragedy  of  Beaumont  and  Fletcher:  — 

"  Not  long  since  walking  in  the  field, 
My  nurse  and  I,  we  there  beheld 
A  goodly  fruit  ;  which,  tempting  me, 
I  would  have  plucked  ;   but,  trembling,  she, 
Whoever  eat  those  berries,  cried, 
In  less  than  half  an  hour  died  !  " 

What  intolerable  seesaw!     Not  much  of  Byron's    "fatal 
facility  "  in  these  octosyllabics! 


DRYDEN  115 

and  Dryden  himself  found  out,  when  he  came 
to  try  it,  that  blank  verse  was  not  so  easy  a 
thing  as  he  at  first  conceived  it,  nay,  that  it  is  the 
most  difficult  of  all  verse,  and  that  it  must  make 
up  in  harmony,  by  variety  of  pause  and  modu 
lation,  for  what  it  loses  in  the  melody  of  rhyme. 
In  what  makes  the  chief  merit  of  his  later  versi 
fication,  he  but  rediscovered  the  secret  of  his 
predecessors  in  giving  to  rhymed  pentameters 
something  of  the  freedom  of  blank  verse,  and 
not  mistaking  metre  for  rhythm. 

Voltaire,  in  his  Commentary  on  Corneille, 
has  sufficiently  lamented  the  awkwardness  of 
movement  imposed  upon  the  French  dramatists 
by  the  gyves  of  rhyme.  But  he  considers  the 
necessity  of  overcoming  this  obstacle,  on  the 
whole,  an  advantage.  Difficulty  is  his  tenth  and 
superior  muse.  How  did  Dryden,  who  says 
nearly  the  same  thing,  succeed  in  his  attempt  at 
the  French  manner  ?  He  fell  into  every  one  of 
its  vices,  without  attaining  much  of  what  con 
stitutes  its  excellence.  From  the  nature  of  the 
language,  all  French  poetry  is  purely  artificial, 
and  its  high  polish  is  all  that  keeps  out  decay. 
The  length  of  their  dramatic  verse  forces  the 
French  into  much  tautology,  into  bombast  in 
its  original  meaning,  the  stuffing  out  a  thought 
with  words  till  it  fills  the  line.  The  rigid  system 
of  their  rhyme,  which  makes  it  much  harder  to 
manage  than  in  English,  has  accustomed  them 


ii6  DRYDEN 

to  inaccuracies  of  thought  which  would  shock 
them  in  prose.  For  example,  in  the  "  Cinna  "  of 
Corneille,  as  originally  written,  Emilie  says  to 
Augustus,  — 

««  Ces  flammes  dans  nos  cceurs  dcs  longtemps  etoient  nees, 
Et  ce  sont  des  secrets  de  plus  de  quatre  annees." 

I  say  nothing  of  the  second  verse,  which  is 
purely  prosaic  surplusage  exacted  by  the  rhyme, 
nor  of  the  jingling  together  of  ces,  des,  etoienty 
neesy  desy  and  secrets,  but  I  confess  that  nees 
does  not  seem  to  be  the  epithet  that  Corneille 
would  have  chosen  for  flammes >  if  he  could 
have  had  his  own  way,  and  that  flames  would 
seem  of  all  things  the  hardest  to  keep  secret. 
But  in  revising,  Corneille  changed  the  first  verse 
thus, — 
"  Ces  flammes  dans  nos  cceurs  sans  votre  ordre  etoient  nees." 

Can  anything  be  more  absurd  than  flames  born 
to  order?  Yet  Voltaire,  on  his  guard  against 
these  rhyming  pitfalls  for  the  sense,  does  not 
notice  this  in  his  minute  comments  on  this  play. 
Of  extravagant  metaphor,  the  result  of  this  same 
making  sound  the  file-leader  of  sense,  a  single 
example  from  "  Heraclius  "  shall  suffice :  — 

"  La  vapeur  de  mon  sang  ira  grossir  la  foudre 
Que  Dieu  dent  deja  prete  a  le  reduire  en  poudre. " 

One  cannot  think  of  a  Louis  Quatorze  Apollo 
except  in  a  full-bottomed  periwig,  and  the  tragic 
style  of  their  poets  is  always  showing  the  disas- 


DRYDEN  ,,7 

trous  influence  of  that  portentous  comet.  It  is 
the  style  -perruque  in  another  than  the  French 
meaning  of  the  phrase,  and  the  skill  lay  in  dress 
ing  it  majestically,  so  that,  as  Gibber  says,  "upon 
the  head  of  a  man  of  sense,  if  it  became  him,  it 
could  never  fail  of  drawing  to  him  a  more  par 
tial  regard  and  benevolence  than  could  possibly 
be  hoped  for  in  an  ill-made  one/'  It  did  not 
become  Dryden,  and  he  left  it  off.1 

Like  his  own  Zimri,  Dryden  was  "all  for" 
this  or  that  fancy,  till  he  took  up  with  another. 
But  even  while  he  was  writing  on  French  mod 
els,  his  judgment  could  not  be  blinded  to  their 
defects.  "  Look  upon  the  (  Cinna '  and  the 
(  Pompey,'  they  are  not  so  properly  to  be  called 
plays  as  long  discourses  of  reason  of  State,  and 
4  Polieucte  '  in  matters  of  religion  is  as  solemn 
as  the  long  stops  upon  our  organs  ;  .  .  .  their 
actors  speak  by  the  hour-glass  like  our  parsons. 
...  I  deny  not  but  this  may  suit  well  enough 
with  the  French,  for  as  we,  who  are  a  more 
sullen  people,  come  to  be  diverted  at  our  plays, 
so  they,  who  are  of  an  airy  and  gay  temper,  come 
thither  to  make  themselves  more  serious." 2 
With  what  an  air  of  innocent  unconsciousness 
the  sarcasm  is  driven  home  !  Again,  while  he 
was  still  slaving  at  these  bricks  without  straw, 

1  In  more  senses  than  one.    His  last  and  best  portrait  shows 
him  in  his  own  gray  hair. 

2  Essay  on  Dramatick  Poesy. 


ii8  DRYDEN 

he  says :  "  The  present  French  poets  are  gen 
erally  accused  that,  wheresoever  they  lay  the 
scene,  or  in  whatever  age,  the  manners  of  their 
heroes  are  wholly  French.  Racine's  Bajazet  is 
bred  at  Constantinople,  but  his  civilities  are 
conveyed  to  him  by  some  secret  passage  from 
Versailles  into  the  Seraglio.'*  It  is  curious  that 
Voltaire,  speaking  of  the  "  Berenice  "  of  Ra 
cine,  praises  a  passage  in  it  for  precisely  what 
Dryden  condemns  :  "  II  semble  qu'on  entende 
Henriette  d'Angleterre  elle-meme  parlant  au 
marquis  de  Vardes.  La  politesse  de  la  cour  de 
Louis  XIV.,  Tagrement  de  la  langue  Francaise, 
la  douceur  de  la  versification  la  plus  naturelle,  le 
sentiment  le  plus  tendre,  tout  se  trouve  dans 
ce  peu  de  vers."  After  Dryden  had  broken 
away  from  the  heroic  style,  he  speaks  out  more 
plainly.  In  the  Preface  to  his  "  All  for  Love," 
in  reply  to  some  cavils  upon  "  little,  and  not 
essential  decencies,"  the  decision  about  which  he 
refers  to  a  master  of  ceremonies,  he  goes  on  to 
say :  "  The  French  poets,  I  confess,  are  strict 
observers  of  these  punctilios ;  ...  in  this 
nicety  of  manners  does  the  excellency  of  French 
poetry  consist.  Their  heroes  are  the  most  civil 
people  breathing,  but  their  good  breeding  sel 
dom  extends  to  a  word  of  sense.  All  their  wit 
is  in  their  ceremony ;  they  want  the  genius  which 
animates  our  stage,  and  therefore  't  is  but  neces 
sary,  when  they  cannot  please,  that  they  should 


DRYDEN  119 

take  care  not  to  offend.  .  .  .  They  are  so  care 
ful  not  to  exasperate  a  critic  that  they  never 
leave  him  any  work,  .  .  .  for  no  part  of  a  poem 
is  worth  our  discommending  where  the  whole 
is  insipid,  as  when  we  have  once  tasted  palled 
wine  we  stay  not  to  examine  it  glass  by  glass. 
But  while  they  affect  to  shine  in  trifles,  they  are 
often  careless  in  essentials.  .  .  .  For  my  part, 
I  desire  to  be  tried  by  the  laws  of  my  own  coun 
try."  This  is  said  in  heat,  but  it  is  plain  enough 
that  his  mind  was  wholly  changed.  In  his  dis 
course  on  epic  poetry  he  is  as  decided,  but  more 
temperate.  He  says  that  the  French  heroic 
verse  "  runs  with  more  activity  than  strength.1 
Their  language  is  not  strung  with  sinews  like 
our  English  ;  it  has  the  nimbleness  of  a  grey 
hound,  but  not  the  bulk  and  body  of  a  mastiff. 
Our  men  and  our  verses  overbear  them  by  their 
weight,  and  pondere>  non  numero,  is  the  British 
motto.  The  French  have  set  up  purity  for  the 
standard  of  their  language,  and  a  masculine  vigor 
is  that  of  ours.  Like  their  tongue  is  the  genius 

1  A  French  hendecasyllable  verse  runs  exactly  like  our  ballad 
measure  :  — 

A  cobbler  there  was  and  he  lived  in  a  stall,   .    .    . 
La  ratson,  pour  marcher,  «' 'a  sou-vent  qu  une  -voye. 

(Dry den's  note.) 

The  verse  is  not  a  hendecasyllable.  "  Attended  watchfully 
to  her  recitative  (Mile.  Duchesnois),  and  find  that,  in  nine 
lines  out  of  ten,  'A  cobbler  there  was,'  etc.,  is  the  tune  of 
the  French  heroics."  (Moore's  Diary,  24th  April,  1821.) 


izo  DRYDEN 

of  their  poets,  —  light  and  trifling  in  comparison 
of  the  English."1 

Dryden  might  have  profited  by  an  admirable 
saying  of  his  own,  that  "  they  who  would  com 
bat  general  authority  with  particular  opinion 
must  first  establish  themselves  a  reputation  of 
understanding  better  than  other  men."  He 
understood  the  defects  much  better  than  the 
beauties  of  the  French  theatre.  Lessing  was 
even  more  one-sided  in  his  judgment  upon  it.2 
Goethe,  with  his  usual  wisdom,  studied  it  care 
fully  without  losing  his  temper,  and  tried  to 
profit  by  its  structural  merits.  Dryden,  with  his 
eyes  wide  open,  copied  its  worst  faults,  especially 
its  declamatory  sentiment.  He  should  have 
known  that  certain  things  can  never  be  trans 
planted,  and  that  among  these  is  a  style  of 
poetry  whose  great  excellence  was  that  it  was  in 

1  "  The  language  of  the  age  is  never  the  language  of  poetry, 
except  among  the  French,  whose  verse,  where  the  thought  or 
image  does  not  support  it,  differs  in  nothing  from  prose." 
(Gray  to  West.) 

2  Diderot  and  Rousseau,  however,  thought  their  language 
unfit  for  poetry,  and  Voltaire  seems  to  have  half  agreed  with 
them.    No  one  has  expressed  this  feeling  more  neatly  than 
Fauriel:   ««  Nul  doute  que  Ton  ne  puisse  dire  en  prose  des 
choses  eminemment  poetiques,  tout  comme  il  n'est  que  trop 
certain  que  Ton  peut  en  dire  de  fort  prosaiques  en  vers,  et 
meme  en  excellents  vers,  en  vers  elegamment  tournes,  et  en 
beau  langage.     C'est  un  fait  dont  je  n'ai  pas  besoin  d'indiquer 
d'exemples:   aucune  litterature  n'en  fournirait  autant  que  le 
noire."   (Histoire  de  la  Pocsie  Proven$alet  ii.  237.) 


DRYDEN  121 

perfect  sympathy  with  the  genius  of  the  people 
among  whom  it  came  into  being.  But  the  truth 
is,  that  Dryden  had  no  aptitude  whatever  for  the 
stage,  and  in  writing  for  it  he  was  attempting  to 
make  a  trade  of  his  genius,  —  an  arrangement 
from  which  the  genius  always  withdraws  in  dis 
gust.  It  was  easier  to  make  loose  thinking  and 
the  bad  writing  which  betrays  it  pass  unobserved 
while  the  ear  was  occupied  with  the  sonorous 
music  of  the  rhyme  to  which  they  marched. 
Except  in  "  All  for  Love,"  "  the  only  play,"  he 
tells  us,  "  which  he  wrote  to  please  himself,"  r 
there  is  no  trace  of  real  passion  in  any  of  his 
tragedies.  This,  indeed,  is  inevitable,  for  there 
are  no  characters,  but  only  personages,  in  any 
except  that.  That  is,  in  many  respects,  a  noble 
play,  and  there  are  few  finer  scenes,  whether 
in  the  conception  or  the  carrying  out,  than  that 
between  Antony  and  Ventidius  in  the  first  act.2 
As  usual,  Dryden's  good  sense  was  not  blind 
to  the  extravagances  of  his  dramatic  style.  In 
"  Mac  Flecknoe  "  he  makes  his  own  Maximin 
the  type  of  childish  rant,  — 

"And  little  Maximins  the  gods  defy  ";  — 

1  Parallel  of  Poetry  and  Painting. 

2  "  II  y  a  seulement  la  scene  de  Ventidius  et  d'Antoine  qui 
est  digne   de   Corneille.     C'est  la  le  sentiment  de  milord  Bo- 
lingbroke  et  de  tous  les  bons  auteurs;   c'est  ainsi   que  pensait 
Addisson."    (Voltaire  to  M.  de  Fromont,  I5th  November, 
I735-) 


122  DRYDEN 

but,  as  usual  also,  he  could  give  a  plausible  rea 
son  for  his  own  mistakes  by  means  of  that  most 
fallacious  of  all  fallacies  which  is  true  so  far  as  it 
goes.  In  his  Prologue  to  the  "  Royal  Martyr  " 
he  says  :  — 

"  And  he  who  servilely  creeps  after  sense 
Is  safe,  bat  ne'er  will  reach  an  excellence. 

But,  when  a  tyrant  for  his  theme  he  had, 
He  loosed  the  reins  and  let  his  muse  run  mad, 
And,  though  he  stumbles  in  a  full  career, 
Yet  rashness  is  a  better  fault  than  fear; 

They  then,  who  of  each  trip  advantage  take, 

Find  out  those  faults  which  they  want  wit  to  make." 

And  in  the  Preface  to  the  same  play  he  tells  us  : 
"  I  have  not  everywhere  observed  the  quality 
of  numbers  in  my  verse,  partly  by  reason  of  my 
haste,  but  more  especially  because  I  would  not 
have  my  sense  a  slave  to  syllables."  Dry  den,  when 
he  had  not  a  bad  case  to  argue,  would  have 
had  small  respect  for  the  wit  whose  skill  lay  in 
the  making  of  faults,  and  has  himself,  where  his 
self-love  was  not  engaged,  admirably  defined  the 
boundary  which  divides  boldness  from  rashness. 
What  Quintilian  says  of  Seneca  applies  very 
aptly  to  Dryden :  "  Velles  eum  suo  ingenio 
dixisse,  alieno  judicio."  '  He  was  thinking  of 
himself,  I  fancy,  when  he  makes  Ventidius  say 
of  Antony,  — 

1    last,  x.,  i.   129. 
in 


DRYDEN  123 

"  He  starts  out  wide 

And  bounds  into  a  vice  that  bears  him  far 
From  his  first  course,  and  plunges  him  in  ills; 
But,  when  his  danger  makes  him  find  his  fault, 
Quick  to  observe,  and  full  of  sharp  remorse, 
He  censures  eagerly  his  own  misdeeds, 
Judging  himself  with  malice  to  himself, 
And  not  forgiving  what  as  man  he  did 
Because  his  other  parts  are  more  than  man." 

But  bad  though  they  nearly  all  are  as  wholes, 
his  plays  contain  passages  which  only  the  great 
masters  have  surpassed,  and  to  the  level  of 
which  no  subsequent  writer  for  the  stage  has 
ever  risen.  The  necessity  of  rhyme  often  forced 
him  to  a  platitude,  as  where  he  says,  — 

"  My  love  was  blind  to  your  deluding  art, 

But  blind  men  feel  when  stabbed  so  near  the  heart."  T 

But  even  in  rhyme  he  not  seldom  justifies  his 
claim  to  the  title  of  "glorious  John."  In  the 
very  play  from  which  I  have  just  quoted  are 
these  verses  in  his  best  manner :  — 

"  No,  like  his  better  Fortune  I  '11  appear, 
With  open  arms,  loose  veil,  and  flowing  hair, 
Just  flying  forward  from  her  rolling  sphere." 

His  comparisons,  as  I  have  said,  are  almost 
always  happy.  This,  from  the  "  Indian  Em 
peror,"  is  tenderly  pathetic  :  — 

"  As  callow  birds, 

Whose  mother  's  killed  in  seeking  of  the  prey, 
Cry  in  their  nest  and  think  her  long  away, 

1  Conquest  of  Granada^  Second  Part. 


i24  DRYDEN 

And,  at  each  leaf  that  stirs,  each  blast  of  wind, 
Gape  for  the  food  which  they  must  never  find." 

And  this,  of  the  anger  with  which  the  Maiden 
Queen,  striving  to  hide  her  jealousy,  betrays 
her  love,  is  vigorous  :  — 

"  Her  rage  was  love,  and  its  tempestuous  flame, 

Like  lightning,  showed  the  heaven  from  whence  it  came." 

The  following  simile  from  the  "  Conquest 
of  Granada  "  is  as  well  expressed  as  it  is  apt  in 
conception:  — 

"  I  scarcely  understand  my  own  intent; 

But,  silk-worm  like,  so  long  within  have  wrought, 
That  I  am  lost  in  my  own  web  of  thought." 

In  the  "  Rival  Ladies,"  Angelina,  walking  in 
the  dark,  describes  her  sensations  naturally  and 
strikingly :  — 

"  No  noise  but  what  my  footsteps  make,  and  they 
Sound  dreadfully  and  louder  than  by  day:  / 

They  double  too,  and  every  step  I  take""' 
Sounds  thick,  methinks,  and  more  than  one  could  make." 

In  all  the  rhymed  plays  '  there  are  many 
passages  which  one  is  rather  inclined  to  like  than 
sure  he  would  be  right  in  liking  them.  The  fol 
lowing  verses  from  "  Aurengzebe  "  are  of  this 
sort :  — 

"  My  love  was  such  it  needed  no  return, 
Rich  in  itself,  like  elemental  fire, 
Whose  pureness  does  no  aliment  require." 

1  In  most,  he  mingles  blank  verse. 


DRYDEN  125 

This  is  Cowleyish,  and  pureness  is  surely  the 
wrong  word ;  and  yet  it  is  better  than  mere 
commonplace.  Perhaps  what  oftenest  turns  the 
balance  in  Dryden's  favor,  when  we  are  weigh 
ing  his  claims  as  a  poet,  is  his  persistent  cap 
ability  of  enthusiasm.  To  the  last  he  kindles, 
and  sometimes  almost  flashes  out  that  super 
natural  light  which  is  the  supreme  test  of  poetic 
genius.  As  he  himself  so  finely  and  character 
istically  says  in  "  Aurengzebe,"  there  was  no 
period  in  his  life  when  it  was  not  true  of  him 
that 

"  He  felt  the  inspiring  heat,  the  absent  god  return." 

The  verses  which  follow  are  full  of  him,  and, 
with  the  exception  of  the  single  word  underwent , 
are  in  his  luckiest  manner :  — 

"  One  loose,  one  sally  of  a  heroe's  soul, 
Does  all  the  military  art  control. 
While  timorous  wit  goes  round,  or  fords  the  shore, 
He  shoots  the  gulf,  and  is  already  o'er, 
And,  when  the  enthusiastic  fit  is  spent, 
Looks  back  amazed  at  what  he  underwent."  ' 

Pithy  sentences  and  phrases  always  drop  from 
Dryden's  pen  as  if  unawares,  whether  in  prose  or 
verse.  I  string  together  a  few  at  random  :  — 

"  The  greatest  argument  for  love  is  love." 
"  Few  know  the  use  of  life  before  't  is  past.*' 
"Time  gives  himself  and  is  not  valued." 
1  Conquest  of  Granada. 


126  DRYDEN 

"Death  in  itself  is  nothing;  but  we  fear 
To  be  we  know  not  what,  we  know  not  where." 

'*  Love  either  finds  equality  or  makes  it; 
Like  death,  he  knows  no  difference  in  degrees." 

"  That 's  empire,  that  which  I  can  give  away." 

"  Yours  is  a  soul  irregularly  great, 
Which,  wanting  temper,  yet  abounds  in  heat." 

"  Forgiveness  to  the  injured  does  belong, 
But  they  ne'er  pardon  who  have  done  the  wrong." 

"  Poor  women's  thoughts  are  all  extempore." 

"The  cause  of  love  can  never  be  assigned, 
'Tis  in  no  face,  but  in  the  lover's  mind."  * 

"  Heaven  can  forgive  a  crime  to  penitence, 
For  Heaven  can  judge  if  penitence  be  true; 
But  man,  who  knows  not  hearts,  should  make  examples." 

"  Kings'  titles  commonly  begin  by  force, 
Which  time  wears  off  and  mellows  into  right." 

"  Fear's  a  large  promiser;  who  subject  live 
To  that  base  passion,  know  not  what  they  give." 

"  The  secret  pleasure  of  the  generous  act 
Is  the  great  mind's  great  bribe." 

"  That -bad  thing,  gold,  buys  all  good  things." 
"  Why,  love  does  all  that  's  noble  here  below." 

'*  To  prove  religion  true, 
If  either  wit  or  sufferings  could  suffice, 
All  faiths  afford  the  constant  and  the  wise." 

1  This  recalls  a  striking  verse  of  Alfred  de  Musset:  — 

"  La  muse  est  toujours  belle, 
Meme  pour  1'insense,  meme  pour  I'impuissant, 
Car  sa  btaut'e  four  nous,  c'est  notre  amour  pour  e//e." 


DRYDEN  127 

But  Dryden,  as  he  tells  us  himself,  — 

"  Grew  weary  of  his  long-loved  mistress,  Rhyme; 
Passion  's  too  fierce  to  be  in  fetters  bound, 
And  Nature  flies  him  like  enchanted  ground." 

The  finest  things  in  his  plays  were  written  in 
blank  verse,  as  vernacular  to  him  as  the  alexan 
drine  to  the  French.  In  this  he  vindicates  his 
claim  as  a  poet.  His  diction  gets  wings, and  both 
his  verse  and  his  thought  become  capable  of  a 
reach  which  was  denied  them  when  set  in  the 
stocks  of  the  couplet.  The  solid  man  becomes 
even  airy  in  this  new-found  freedom  :  Antony 
says,  - 

"  How  I  loved, 

Witness  ye  days  and  nights,  and  all  ye  hours 
That  danced  away  with  down  upon  your  feet." 

And  what  image  was  ever  more  delicately  ex 
quisite,  what  movement  more  fadingly  accord 
ant  with  the  sense,  than  in  the  last  two  verses  of 
the  following  passage  ? 

"  I  feel  death  rising  higher  still  and  higher, 
Within  my  bosom;  every  breath  I  fetch 
Shuts  up  my  life  within  a  shorter  compass, 
And,  like  the  vanishing  sound  cf  bells,  grows  less 
And  less  each  pulse,  till  it  be  lost  in  air. ' '  x 

Nor  was  he  altogether  without  pathos,  though 
it  is  rare  with  him.  The  following  passage  seems 
to  me  tenderly  full  of  it :  — 

1  Rival  Ladies. 


iz8  DRYDEN 

"Something  like 

That  voice  methinks,  I  should  have  somewhere  heard; 
But  floods  of  woe  have  hurried  it  far  off" 
Beyond  my  ken  of  soul."  l 

And  this  single  verse  from  "  Aurengzebe":  — 
"  Live  still  !  oh  live  !  live  even  to  be  unkind  !  " 

with  its  passionate  eagerness  and  sobbing  repe 
tition,  is  worth  a  ship-load  of  the  long-drawn 
treacle  of  modern  self-compassion. 

Now  and  then,  to  be  sure,  we  come  upon  some 
thing  that  makes  us  hesitate  again  whether,  after 
all,  Dryden  was  not  grandiose  rather  than  great, 
as  in  the  two  passages  that  next  follow  :  — 

"  He  looks  secure  of  death,  superior  greatness, 
Like  Jove  when  he  made  Fate  and  said,  Thou  art 
The  slave  of  my  creation."  2 

"I'm  pleased  with  my  own  work;  Jove  was  not  more 
With  infant  nature,  when  his  spacious  hand 
Had  rounded  this  huge  ball  of  earth  and  seas, 
To  give  it  the  first  push  and  see  it  roll 
Along  the  vast  abyss."  3 

I  should  say  that  Dryden  is  more  apt  to  di 
late  our  fancy  than  our  thought,  as  great  poets 
have  the  gift  of  doing.  But  if  he  have  not  the 
potent  alchemy  that  transmutes  the  lead  of  our 
commonplace  associations  into  gold,  as  Shake 
speare  knows  how  to  do  so  easily,  yet  his  sense 
is  always  up  to  the  sterling  standard  ;  and  though 

1  Don  Sebastian.  *  Ibid.  3  C home  net. 


DRYDEN  129 

he  has  not  added  so  much  as  some  have  done 
to  the  stock  of  bullion  which  others  afterwards 
coin  and  put  in  circulation,  there  are  few  who 
have  minted  so  many  phrases  that  are  still  a  part 
of  our  daily  currency.  The  first  line  of  the  fol 
lowing  passage  has  been  worn  pretty  smooth, 
but  the  succeeding  ones  are  less  familiar:  — 

f<  Men  are  but  children  of  a  larger  growth, 
Our  appetites  as  apt  to  change  as  theirs, 
And  full  as  •cra^yjngjtqp  and  full  as  vain; 
And  yet  the  soul,  shut  up  in  her  darfc  room,' 
Viewing  so  clear  abroad,  at  home  sees  nothing; 
But,  like  a  mole  in  earth,  busy  and  blind, 
Works  all  her  folly  up  and  casts  it  outward 
In  the  world's  open  view."  I 

The  image  is  mixed  and  even  contradictory, 
but  the  thought  obtains  grace  for  it.  I  feel  as  if 
Shakespeare  would  have  written  seeing  for  view 
ing  y  thus  gaining  the  strength  of  repetition  in 
one  vejrse  and  avoiding  the  sameness  of  it  in  the 
other.  Dryden,  I  suspect,  was,  not  much  given 
to  correction,  and  indeed  one  of'the  great  charms 
of  his  best  writing  is  that  everything  seems  struck 
off  at  a  heat,  as  by  a  superior  man  in  the  best 
mood  of  his  talk.  Where  he  rises,  he  generally 
becomes  fervent  rather  than  imaginative ;  his 
thought  does  not  incorporate  itself  in  metaphor, 
as  in  purely  poetic  minds,  but  repeats  and  rein 
forces  itself  in  simile.  Where  he  is  imaginative, 

1  All  for  Love. 


130  DRYDEN 

it  is  in  that  lower  sense  which  the.  poverty  of 
our  language,  for  want  of  a  better  word,  com 
pels  us  to  call  picturesque,  and  even  then  he 
shows  little  of  that  finer  instinct  which  suggests 
so  much  more  than  it  tells,  and  works  the  more 
powerfully  as  it  taxes  more  the  imagination  of 
the  reader.  In  Donne's  "  Relic"  there  is  an 
example  of  what  I  mean.  He  fancies  some  one 
breaking  up  his  grave  and  spying 

"  A  bracelet  of  bright  hair  about  the  bone,"  — 

a  verse  that  still  shines  there  in  the  darkness  of 
the  tomb,  after  two  centuries,  like  one  of  those 
inextinguishable  lamps  whose  secret  is  lost.1  Yet 
Dryden  sometimes  showed  a  sense  of  this  magic 
of  a  mysterious  hint,  as  in  the  "  Spanish 
Friar  ":- 

"  No,  I  confess,  you  bade  me  not  in  words; 
The  dial  spoke  not,  but  it  made  shrewd  signs, 
And  pointed  full  upon  the  stroke  of  murder." 

This  is  perhaps  a  solitary  example.  Nor  is  he 
always  so  possessed  by  the  image  in  his  mind 
as  unconsciously  to  choose  even  the  pictur- 

1  Dryden,  with  his  wonted  perspicacity,  follows  Ben  Jon- 
son  in  calling  Donne  "  the  greatest  wit,  though  not  the  best 
poet,  of  our  nation."  (Dedication  of  Eleonora.)  Even  as  a 
poet  Donne 

"  Had  in  him  those  brave  translunary  things 
That  our  first  poets  had." 

To  open  vistas  for  the  imagination  through  the  blind  wall  of 
the  senses,  as  he  could  sometimes  do,  is  the  supreme  function 
of  poetry. 


DRYDEN  131 

esquely  Imaginative  word.  He  has  done  so, 
however,  in  this  passage  from  <c  Marriage  a  la 
Mode":- 

"  You  ne'er  must  hope  again  to  see  your  princess, 
Except  as  prisoners  view  fair  walks  and  streets, 
And  careless  passengers  going  by  their  grates." 

But  after  all,  he  is  best  upon  a  level,  table-land, 
it  is  true,  and  a  very  high  level,  but  still  some 
where  between  the  loftier  peaks  of  inspiration 
and  the  plain  of  every-day  life.  I  n  those  passages 
where  he  moralizes  he  is  always  good,  setting 
some  obvious  truth  in  a  new  light  by  vigorous 
phrase  and  happy  illustration.  Take  this  (from 
"  QEdipus  ")  as  a  proof  of  it :  — 

'*  The  gods  are  just, 
But  how  can  finite  measure  infenite  ? 
Reason  !  alas,  it  does  not  know  itself ! 
Yet  man,  vain  man,  would  with  his  short-lined  plummet 
Fathom  the  vast  abyss  of  heavenly  justice. 
Whatever  is,  is  in  its  causes  just, 
Since  all  things  are  by  fate.     But  purblind  man 
Sees  but  a  part  o'  th'  chain,  the  nearest  links, 
His  eyes  not  carrying  to  that  equal  beam 
That  poises  all  above." 

From  the  same  play  I  pick  an  illustration  of 
that  ripened  sweetness  of  thought  and  language 
which  marks  the  natural  vein  of  Dryden.  One 
cannot  help  applying  the  passage  to  the  late  Mr. 
Quincy:  — 


132  DRYDEN 

"  Of  no  distemper,  of  no  blast  he  died, 

But  fell  like  autumn  fruit  that  mellowed  long, 
E'en  wondered  at  because  he  dropt  no  sooner; 
Fate  seemed  to  wind  him  up  for  fourscore  years; 
Yet  freshly  ran  he  on  ten  winters  more, 
Till,  like  a"  clock  worn  out  with  eating  Time, 
The  wheels  of  weary  life  at  last  stood  still."  x 

Here  is  another  of  the  same  kind  from  "  All  for 
Love  "  :  — 

"  Gone  so  soon! 

Is  Death  no  more  ?    He  used  him  carelessly, 
With  a  familiar  kindness;  ere  he  knocked, 
Ran  to  the  door  and  took  him  in  his  arms, 
As  who  should  say,  You  're  welcome  at  all  hours, 
A  friend  need  give  no  warning." 

With  one  more  extract  from  the  same  play,  which 
is  in  every  way  his  best,  for  he  had,  when  he  wrote 
it,  been  feeding  on  the  bee-bread  of  Shakespeare, 
I  shall  conclude.  Antony  says, — 

"  For  I  am  now  so  sunk  from  what  I  was, 
Thou  find'st  me  at  my  lowest  water-mark. 
The  rivers  that  ran  in  and  raised  my  fortunes 
Are  all  dried  up,  or  take  another  course: 
What  I  have  left  is  from  my  native  spring; 
I  've  a  heart  still  that  swells  in  scorn  of  Fate, 
And  lifts  me  to  my  banks." 

This  is  certainly,  from  beginning  to  end,  in  what 
used  to  be  called  the  grand  style,  at  once  noble 
and  natural.  I  have  not  undertaken  to  analyze 
any  one  of  the  plays,  for  (except  in  "  All  for 

1   My  own  judgment  is  my  sole  warrant  for  attributing  these 
extracts  from  (Edipus  to  Dryden  rather  than  Lee. 


DRYDEN  133 

Love  ")  it  would  have  been  only  to  expose  their 
weakness.  Dryden  had  no  constructive  faculty  ; 
and  in  every  one  of  his  longer  poems  that  re 
quired  a  plot,  the  plot  is  bad,  always  more  or  less 
inconsistent  with  itself,  and  rather  hitched-on  to 
the  subject  than  combining  with  it.  It  is  fair 
to  say,  however,  before  leaving  this  part  of  Dry- 
den'^,  literary  work,  that  Home  Tooke  thought 
"  Don  Sebastian  "  "  the  best  play  extant."  l 
Gray  admired  the  plays  of  Dryden,  "not  as  dra 
matic  compositions,  but  as  poetry."  "  There 
are  as  many  things  finely  said  in  his  plays  as 
almost  by  anybody,"  said  Pope  to  Spence.  Of  , 
their  rant,  their  fustian,  their  bombast,  their  bad 
English,  of  their  innumerable  sins  against  Dry- 
den's  own  better  conscience  both  as  poet  and 
critic,  I  shall  excuse  myself  from  giving  any 
instances.3  I  like  what  is  good  in  Dryden  so 

1  Recollections  of  Rogers,  p.  165. 

2  Nicholls's  Reminiscences  of  Gray.    Pickering's  edition  of 
Gray's  Works,  vol.  v.  p.  35. 

3  Let  one  suffice  for  all.    In  the  Royal  Martyr ,  Porphyrius, 
waiting  his  execution,  says  to  Maximin,  who  had  wished  him 
for  a  son-in-law:  — • 

"  Where'er  thou  stand'st,  I  '11  level  at  that  place 
My  gushing  blood,  and  spout  it  at  thy  face  ; 
Thus  not  by  marriage  we  our  blood  will  join  ; 
Nay,  more,  my  arms  shall  throw  my  head  at  thine." 

"It  is  no  shame,"  says  Dryden  himself,  "to  be  a  poet, 
though  it  is  to  be  a  bad  one."  Gibber  seems  to  say  that  the 
audience  could  not  help  laughing  at  Dry  den's  Rhodomontades 
as  he  calls  them. 


i34  DRYDEN 

much,  and  it  is  so  good,  that  I  think  Gray  was 
justified  in  always  losing  his  temper  when  he 
heard  "  his  faults  criticised."  ' 

It  is  as  a  satirist  and  pleader  in  verse  that 
Dryden  is  best  known,  and  as  both  he  is  in  some 
respects  unrivalled.  His  satire  is  not  so  sly  as 
Chaucer's,  but  it  is  distinguished  by  the  same 
good  nature.  Jhere  is  no  maJJ^  in Jt^  I  shall 
not  enter  into  his  literary  quarrels  further  than 
to  say  that  he  seems  to  me,  on  the  whole,  to  have 
been  forbearing,  which  is  the  more  striking  as  he 
tells  us  repeatedly  that  he  was  naturally  vindic 
tive.  It  was  he  who  called  revenge  "  the  darling 
attribute  of  heaven."  "  I  complain  not  of  their 
lampoons  and  libels,  though  I  have  been  the 
public  mark  for  many  years.  I  am  vindictive 
enough  to  have  repelled  force  by  force,  if  I  could 
imagine  that  any  of  them  had  ever  reached  me." 
It  was  this  feeling  of  easy  superiority,  I  suspect, 
that  made  him  the  mark  for  so  much  jealous 
vituperation.  Scott  is  wrong  in  attributing  his, 
onslaught  upon  Settle  to  jealousy  because  one 
of  the  latter's  plays  had  been  performed  at  Court, 
—  an  honor  never  paid  to  any  4)f  Dry.den's.* 

1  Gray,  ubi  supra y  p.  38.  » 

2  Scott  had  never  seen  Pepys's  Diary  when  he  wrote  this, 
or  he  would  have  left  it  unwritten:    "  Fell  to  discourse  of  the 
last  night's  work  at  .Court,   where  the  ladies  and  Duke  of 
Monmoath  acted  the   Indian  Emperor  wherein  they  told  me 
these  things  most  remarkable   that   not  any  woman   but  the 
Duchess  of  Monmouth  and  Mrs.  Cornwallis  did  anything  but 


DRYDEN  135 

I  have  found  nothing  like  a  trace  of  jealousy  in 
that  large  and^benignant  nature.  In  his  vindi 
cation  of  the  "  Duke  of  Guise,"  he  says,  with 
honest  confidence  in  himself:  "  Nay,  I  durst 
almost  refer  myself  to  some  of  the  angry  poets 
on  the  other  side,  whether  I  have  not  rather 
countenanced  and  assisted  their  beginnings  than 
hindered  them  from  rising."  He  seems  to  have 
been  really  as  indifferent  to  the  attacks  on  him 
self  as  Pope  pretended  to  be.  In  the  same 
vindication  he  says  of  the  "  Rehearsal,"  the  only 
one  of  them  that  had  any  wit  in  it,  and  it  has 
a  great  deal :  "  Much  less  am  I  concerned  at  the 
noble  name  of  Bayes ;  that's  a  brat  so  like  his 
own  father  that  he  cannot  be  mistaken  for  any 
other  body.  They  might  as  reasonably  have 
called  Tom  Sternhold  Virgil,  and  the  resem 
blance  would  have  held  as  well."  In  his  "  Essay 
on  Satire  "  he  says  :  cc  And  yet  we  know  that  in 
Christian  chanty  all  offences  are  to  be  forgiven 
as  we  expect  the  like  pardon  for  those  we  daily 
commit  against  Almighty  God.  And  this  con 
sideration  has  often  made  me  tremble  when  I 
was  saying  our  Lord's  Prayer;  for  the  plain  con 
dition  of  the  forgiveness  which  we  beg  is  the  par 
doning  of  others  the  offences  which  they  have 

like  fools  and  stocks,  but  that  these  two  did  do  most  extraor 
dinary  well;  that  not  any  man  did  anything  well  but  Captain 
O' Bryan,  who  spoke  and  did  well,  but  above  all  things  did 
dance  most  incomparably."  ( 1 4th  January,  1668.) 


136  DRYDEN 

done  to  us  ;  for  which  reason  I  have  many  times 
avoided  the  commission  of  that  fifult,  even  when 
I  have  been  notoriously  provoked."  '  And  in 
another  passage  he  says,  with  his  usual  wisdom : 
"  Good  sense  and  good  nature  are  never  sep 
arated,  though  the  ignorant  world  has  thought 
otherwise.  Good  nature,  by  which  I  mean  bene 
ficence  and  candor,  is  the  product  of  right  reason, 
which  of  necessity  will  give  allowrnce  to  the 
failings  of  others,  by  considering  that  there  is 
nothing  perfect  in  mankind/'  In  the  same  Es 
say  he  gives  his  own  receipt  for  satire  :  "  How 
easy  it  is  to  call  rogue  and  villain,  and  that  wit 
tily  !  but  how  hard  to  make  a  man  appear  a  fool, 
a  blockhead,  or  a  knave,  without  using  any  of 
those  opprobrious  terms  !  .  .  .  This  is  the  mys 
tery  of  that  noble  trade.  .  .  .  Neither  is  it  true 
that  this  fineness  of  raillery  is  offensive  :  a  witty 
man  is  tickled  while  he  is  hurt  in  this  manner, 
and  a  fool  feels  it  not.  .  .  .  There  is  a  vast  dif 
ference  between  the  slovenly  butchering  of  a 
man  and  the  fineness  of  a  stroke  that  separates 
the  head  from  the  body,  and  leaves  it  standing 
in  its  place.  A  man  may  be  capable,  as  Jack 
Ketch's  wife  said  of  his  servant,  of  a  plain  piece 
of  work,  of  a  bare  hanging  ;  but  to  make  a  male 
factor  die  sweetly  was  only  belonging  to  her 

1  See  also  that  noble  passage  in  The  Hind  and  the  Panther 
(1573-1591),  where  this  is  put  into  verse.  Dry  den  always 
thought  in  prose. 


DRYDEN  i37 

husband.  I  wish  I  could  apply  it  to  myself,  if 
the  reader  would  be  kind  enough  to  think  it 
belongs  to  me.  The  character  of  Zimri  in  my 
c  Absalom  '  is,  in  my  opinion,  worth  the  whole 
poem.  It  is  not  bloody,  but  it  is  ridiculous 
enough,  and  he  for  whom  it  was  intended  was 
too  witty  to  resent  it  as  an  injury.  ...  I 
avoided  the  mention  of  great  crimes,  and  ap 
plied  myself  to  the  representing  of  blind  sides 
and  little  extravagances,  to  which,  the  wittier 
a  man  is,  he  is  generally  the  more  obnoxious." 
Dryden  thought  his  genius  led  him  that  way. 
In  his  elegy  on  the  satirist  Oldham,  whom 
Hallam,  without  reading  him,  I  suspect,  ranks 
next  to  Dryden,1  he  says:  — 'v 

"  For  sure  our  souls  were  near  allied,  and  thine 
Cast  in  the  same  poetic  mould  with  mine; 
One  common  note  in  either  lyre  did  strike, 
And  knaves  and  fools  we  both  abhorred  alike." 

His  practice  is  not  always  so  delicate  as  his 
theory  ;  but  if  he  was  sometimes  rough,  he  never 
took  a  base  advantage.  He  knocks  his  antag 
onist  down,  and  there  an  end.  Pope  seems  to 
have  nursed  his  grudge,  and  then,  watching  his 
chance,  to  have  squirted  vitriol  from  behind  a 
corner,  rather  glad  than  otherwise  if  it  fell  on 

1  Probably  on  the  authority  of  this  very  epitaph,  as  if  epi 
taphs  were  to  be  believed  even  under  oath !  A  great  many 
authors  live  because  we  read  nothing  but  their  tombstones. 
Oldham  was,  to  borrow  one  of  Dryden's  phrases,  "a  bad 
or,  which  is  worse,  an  indifferent  poet." 


138  DRYDEN 

the  women  of  those  he  hated  or  envied.  And 
if  Dryden  is  never  dastardly,  as  Pope  often  was, 
so  also  he  never  wrote  anything  so  maliciously 
depreciatory  as  Pope's  unprovoked  attack  on 
Addison.  Dryden's  satire  is  often  coarse,  but 
where  it  is  coarsest,  it  is  commonly  in  defence 
of  himself  against  attacks  that  were  themselves 
brutal.  Then,  to  be  sure,  he  snatches  the  first 
ready  cudgel,  as  in  Shadwell's  case,  though  even 
then  there  is  something  of  the  good  humor 
of  conscious  strength.  Pope's  provocation  was 
too  often  the  mere  opportunity  to  say  a  biting 
thing,  where  he  could  do  it  safely.  If  his  victim 
showed  fight,  he  tried  to  smooth  things  over,  as 
with  Dennis  and  Hill.  Dryden  could  forget  that 
he  had  ever  had  a  quarrel,  but  he  never  slunk 
away  from  any,  least  of  all  from  one  provoked 
by  himself.1  Pope's  satire  is  too  much  occupied 
with  the  externals  of  manners,  habits,  personal 
defects,  and  peculiarities.  Dryden  goes  right 
to  the  rooted  character  of  the  man,  to  the 
weaknesses  of  his  nature,  as  where  he  says  of 
Burnett :  — 

"  Prompt  to  assail,  and  careless  of  defence, 
Invulnerable  in  his  impudence, 
He  dares  the  world,  and,  eager  of  a  name, 
He  thrusts  about  andjust/es  into  fame. 

1    "  He  was  of  a  nature  exceedingly  humane  and   compas 
sionate,  easily  forgiving  injuries,  and  capable  of  a  prompt  and 
sincere    reconciliation  with  them   that    had   offended  him." 
(Congreve.) 
Ill 


DRYDEN 

%So  fond  of  loud  report  that,  not  to  miss 
Of  being  known  (his  last  and  utmost  bliss) 
He  rather  would  be  known  for  what  he  is. 


It  would  be  hard  to  find  in  Pope  such  com 
pression  of  meaning  as  in  the  first,  or  such 
penetrative  sarcasm  as  in  the  second  of  the 
passages  I  have  underscored.  Dryden's  satire 
is  still  quoted  for  its  comprehensiveness  of  ap 
plication,  Pope's  rather  for  the  elegance  of  its 
finish  and  the  point  of  its  phrase  than  for  any 
deeper  qualities.1  I  do  not  remember  that  Dry- 
den  ever  makes  poverty  a  reproach.2  He  was 
above  it,  alike  by  generosity  of  birth  and  mind. 
Pope  is  always  the  parvenu,  always  giving  him 
self  the  airs  of  a  fine  gentleman,  and,  like  Horace 
Walpole  and  Byron,  affecting  superiority  to  pro- 

1  Coleridge  says  excellently:    "You  will   find  this  a  good 
gauge    or  criterion    of  genius,  —  whether   it  progresses  and 
evolves,  or  only  spins  upon  itself.    Take  Dryden's  Achitophel 
and  Zimri;  every  line  adds  to  or  modifies  the  character,  which 
is,  as  it  were,  a-building  up  to  the  very  last  verse;  whereas  in 
Pope's  Timon,  etc.,  the  first  two  or  three  couplets  contain  all 
the  pith  of  the  character,  and  the  twenty  or  thirty  lines  that 
follow  are  so  much  evidence  or  proof  of  overt  acts  of  jealousy, 
or  pride,  or  whatever  it  may  be  that  is  satirized.'*    (Table- 
Talk,  192.)    Some  of  Dryden's  best  satirical,  hits  are  let  fall 
by  seeming  accident  in  his  prose,  as  where  he  says  of  his 
Protestant  assailants,  "  Most  of  them  love  all  whores  but  her 
of  Babylon."    They  had  first  attacked  him  on  the  score  of  his 
private  morals. 

2  That  he  taxes  Shadwell  with  it  is  only  a  seeming  excep 
tion,  as  any  careful  reader  will  see. 


HO  DRYDEN 

fessional  literature.  Dryden,  like  Lessing,wasa 
hack-writer,  and  was  proud,  as  an  honest  man 
has  a  right  to  be,  of  being  able  to  get  his  bread 
by  his  brains.  He  lived  in  Grub  Street  all  his 
life,  and  never  dreamed  that  where  a  man  of 
genius  lived  was  not  the  best  quarter  of  the 
town.  "  Tell  his  Majesty/'  said  sturdy  old 
Jonson,  "that  his  soul  lives  in  an  alley." 

Dryden's  prefaces  are  a  mine  of  good  writing 
and  judicious  criticism.  His  obiter  dicta  have 
often  the  penetration,  and  always  more  than  the 
equity,  of  Voltaire's,  for  Dryden  never  loses 
temper,  and  never  altogether  qualifies  his  judg 
ment  by  his  self-love.  "  He  was  a  more  uni 
versal  writer  than  Voltaire,"  said  Home  Tooke, 
and  perhaps  it  is  true  that  he  had  a  broader  view, 
though  his  learning  was  neither  so  extensive  nor 
so  accurate.  My  space  will  not  afford  many  ex 
tracts,  but  I  cannot  forbear  one  or  two.  He  says 
of  Chaucer,  that  "  he  is  a  perpetual  fountain  of 
good  sense,"  1  and  likes  him  better  than  Ovid, 
-a  bold  confession  in  that  day.  He  prefers 
the  pastorals  of  Theocritus  to  those  of  Virgil. 
"Virgil's  shepherds  are  too  well  read  in  the 
philosophy  of  Epicurus  and  of  Plato  "  ;  "  there 
is  a  kind  of  rusticity  in  all  those  pompous 
verses,  somewhat  of  a  holiday  shepherd  strut 
ting  in  his  country  buskins  "  ; 2  "  Theocritus  is 

1   Preface  to  Fables. 

3  Dedication  of  the  Georgia. 


DRYDEN  Hi 

softer  than  Ovid,  he  touches  the  passions  more 
delicately,  and  performs  all  this  out  of  his  own 
fund,  without  diving  into  the  arts  and  sciences 
for  a  supply.  Even  his  Doric  dialect  has  an 
incomparable  sweetness  in  his  clownishness,  like 
a  fair  shepherdess,  in  her  country  russet,  talk 
ing  in  a  Yorkshire  tone."  x  Comparing  Virgil's 
verse  with  that  of  some  other  poets,  he  says, 
that  his  "  numbers  are  perpetually  varied  to 
increase  the  delight  of  the  reader,  so  that  the 
same 'sounds  are  never  repeated  twice  together. 
On  the  contrary,  Ovid  and  Claudian,  though 
they  write  in  styles  different  from  each  other, 
yet  have  each  of  them  but  one  sort  of  music 
in  their  verses.  All  the  versification  and  little 
variety  of  Claudian  is  included  within  the  com 
pass  of  four  or  five  lines,  and  then  he  begins 
again  in  the  same  tenor,  perpetually  closing  his 
sense  at  the  end  of  a  verse,  and  that  verse  com 
monly  which  they  call  golden,  or  two  substan 
tives  and  two  adjectives  with  a  verb  betwixt 
them  to  keep  the  peace.  Ovid,  with  all  his 
sweetness,  has  as  little  variety  of  numbers  and 
sound  as  he ;  he  is  always,  as  it  were,  upon  the 
hand-gallop,  and  his  verse  runs  upon  carpet- 
ground."  2  What  a  dreary  half  century  would 
have  been  saved  to  English  poetry,  could  Pope 
have  laid  these  sentences  to  heart,  who,  accord- 

1   Preface  to  Second  Miscellany. 
*  Ibid. 


i42  DRYDEN 

ing  to  Spence,  "  learned  versification  wholly 
from  Dryden's  works  "  !  Upon  translation,  no 
one  has  written  so  much  and  so  well  as  Dryden 
in  his  various  prefaces.  Whatever  has  been  said 
since  is  either  expansion  or  variation  of  what  he 
had  said  before.  His  general  theory  may  be 
stated  as  an  aim  at  something  between  the  literal- 
ness  of  metaphrase  and  the  looseness  of  para 
phrase.  "  Where  I  have  enlarged,"  he  says,  "  I 
desire  the  false  critics  would  not  always  think 
that  those  thoughts  are  wholly  mine,  but  either 
they  are  secretly  in  the  poet,  or  may  be  fairly 
deduced  from  him."  Coleridge,  with  his  usual 
cleverness  of  assimilation,  has  condensed  him  in 
a  letter  to  Wordsworth  :  "  There  is  no  medium 
between  a  prose  version  and  one  on  the  avowed 
principle  of  compensation  in  the  widest  sense,  i.  e. 
manner,  genius,  total  effect."  r 

I  have  selected  these  passages,  not  because 
they  are  the  best,  but  because  they  have  a  near 
application  to  Dryden  himself.  His  own  char 
acterization  of  Chaucer  (though  too  narrow  for 
the  greatest  but  one  of  Knglish  poets)  is  the 
best  that  could  be  given  of  himself:  "  He  is  a 
perpetual  fountain  of  good  sense."  And  the 
other  passages  show  him  a  close  and  open- 
minded  student  of  the  art  he  professed.  Has 
his  influence  on  our  literature,  but  especially  on 
our  poetry,  been  on  the  whole  for  good  or  evil  ? 
1  Memoirs  of  Wordswortht\Q\.  ii.p.  74 (American  edition). 


DRYDEN  H3 

If  he  could  have  been  read  with  the  liberal  un 
derstanding  which  he  brought  to  the  works  of 
others,  I  should  answer  at  once  that  it  had  been 
beneficial.  But  his  translations  and  paraphrases, 
in  some  ways  the  best  things  he  did,  were  done, 
like  his  plays,  under  contract  to  deliver  a  certain 
number  of  verses  for  a  specified  sum.  The  ver 
sification,  of  which  he  had  learned  the  art  by 
long  practice,  is  excellent,  but  his  haste  has  led 
him  to  fill  out  the  measure  of  lines  with  phrases 
that  add  only  to  dilute,  and  thus  the  clearest, 
the  most  direct,  the  most  manly  versifier  of  his 
time  became,  without  meaning  it,  the  source 
(fons  et  origo  malorum]  of  that  poetic  diction  from 
which  our  poetry  has  not  even  yet  recovered. 
I  do  not  like  tosay  it,  but  he  has  sometimes 
smothered  the  child-like  simplicity  of  Chaucer 
under  featherIBeHs~of  verbiage?" What  this  kind 
of  thing  came  to  in  the  next  century,  when 
everybody  ceremoniously  took  a  bushel-basket 
to  bring  a  wren's  egg  to  market  in,  is  only  too 
sadly  familiar.  It  is  clear  that  his  natural  taste 
led  Dryden  to  prefer  directness  and  simplicity 
of  style.  If  he  was  too  often  tempted  astray  by 
Artifice,  his  love  of  Nature  betrays  itself  in  many 
an  almost  passionate  outbreak  of  angry  remorse. 
Addison  tells  us  that  he  took  particular  delight 
in  the  reading  of  our  old  English  ballads.  What 
he  valued  above  all  things  was  Force,  though 
in  his  haste  he  is  willing  to  make  a  shift  with  its 


"44  DRYDEN 

counterfeit,  Effect.  As  usual,  he  had  a  good 
reason  to  urge  for  what  he  did :  "  I  will  not 
excuse,  but  justify  myself  for  one  pretended 
crime  for  which  I  am  liable  to  be  charged  by 
false  critics,  not  only  in  this  translation,  but  in 
many  of  my  original  poems,  —  that  I  Latinize 
too  much.  It  is  true  that  when  I  find  an  English 
word  significant  and  sounding,  I  neither  borrow 
from  the  Latin  or  any  other  language  ;  but  when 
I  want  at  home  I  must  seek  abroad.  If  sound 
ing  words  are  not  of  our  growth  and  manufacture, 
who  shall  hinder  me  to  import  them  from  a 
foreign  country?  I  carry  not  out  the  treasure 
of  the  nation  which  is  never  to  return  ;  but  what 
I  bring  from  Italy  I  spend  in  England  :  here 
it  remains,  and  here  it  circulates  ;  for  if  the  coin 
be  good,  it  will  pass  from  one  hand  to  another. 
I  trade  both  with  the  living  and  the  dead  for 
the  enrichment  of  our  native  language.  We 
have  enough  in  England  to  supply  our  necessity; 
but  if  we  will  have  things  of  magnificence  and 
splendor,  we  must  get  them  by  commerce.  .  .  . 
Therefore,  if  I  find  a  word  in  a  classic  author,  I 
propose  it  to  be  naturalized  by  using  it  myself, 
and  if  the  public  approve  of  it  the  bill  passes. 
But  every  man  cannot  distinguish  betwixt  ped 
antry  and  poetry ;  every  man,  therefore,  is  not 
fit  to  innovate."  x  This  is  admirably  said,  and 

1  A  Discourse  of  Epick  Poetry.     "  If  the  public  approve." 
"  On  ne  peut  pas  admettre  dans  le  developpement  des  Ian- 


DRYDEN  H5 

with  Dryden's  accustomed  penetration  to  the 
root  of  the  matter.  The  Latin  has  given  us 
most  of  our  canorous  words,  only  they  must 
not  be  confounded  with  merely  sonorous  ones, 
still  less  with  phrases  that,  instead  of  supple 
menting  the  sense,  encumber  it.  It  was  of 
Latinizing  in  this  sense  that  Dryden  was  guilty. 
Instead  of  stabbing,  he  "with  steel  invades 
the  life."  The  consequence  was  that  by  and 
by  we  have  Dr.  Johnson's  poet,  Savage,  telling 
us,— 

"  In  front,  a  parlor  meets  my  entering  view, 
Opposed  a  room  to  sweet  refection  due  ' '  ;  — 

Dr.  Blacklock  making  a  forlorn  maiden  say  of 
her  "  dear,"  who  is  out  late, — 

"  Or  by  some  apoplectic  fit  deprest 
Perhaps,  alas!  he  seeks  eternal  rest"  ;  — 

and  Mr.  Bruce,  in  a  Danish  war-song,  calling 
on  the  Vikings  to  "  assume  their  oars."  But  it 
must  be  admitted  of  Dryden  that  he  seldom 
makes  the  second  verse  of  a  couplet  the  mere 
trainbearer  to  the  first,  as  Pope  was  continually 
doing.  In  Dryden  the  rhyme  waits  upon  the 
thought ;  in  Pope  and  his  school  the  thought 
curtsys  to  the  tune  for  which  it  is  written. 

gues  aucune  revolution  artificielle  et  sciemment  executee;  il 
n'y  a  pour  elles  ni  conciles,  ni  assemblies  deliberantes;  on 
ne  les  reforme  pas  comme  une  constitution  vicieuse."  (Renan^ 
De  r  Origin e  du  Langage,  p.  95.) 


146  DRYDEN 

Dryden  has  also  been  blamed  for  his  galli 
cisms.1  He  tried  some,  it  is  true,  but  they  have 
not  been  accepted.  I  do  not  think  he  added  a 
single  word  to  the  language,  unless,  as  I  suspect, 
he  first  used  magnetism  in  its  present  sense  of 
moral  attraction.  What  he  did  in  his  best  writ 
ing  was  to  use  the  English  as  if  it  were  a  spoken, 
and  not  merely  an  inkhorn  language ;  as  if  it 
were  his  own  to  do  what  he  pleased  with  it,  as 
if  it  need  not  be  ashamed  of  itself.2  In  this  re 
spect,  his  service  to  our  prose  was  greater  than 
any  other  man  has  ever  rendered.  He  says  he 
formed  his  style  upon  Tillotson's  (Bossuet,  on 
the  other  hand,  formed  his  upon  Corneille's) ; 
but  I  rather  think  he  got  it  at  Will's,  for  its 
great  charm  is  that  it  has  the  various  freedom  of 

1  This  is  an   old   complaint.     Puttenham   sighs  over  such 
innovation  in    Elizabeth's   time,   and   Carew  in  James's.    A 
language  grows,  and  is  not  made.    Almost  all  the  new-fangled 
words  with  which  Johnson  in  his  Poetaster  taxes  Marston  are 
now  current. 

2  Like  most  idiomatic,  as  distinguished  from  correct  writers, 
he  knew  very  little  about  the  language  historically  or  critically. 
His  prose  and  poetry  swarm  with  locutions  that  would  have 
made   Lindley   Murray's  hair  stand  on   end.     How  little  he 
knew  is  plain  from  his  criticising  in  Ben  Jonson  the  use  of  ones 
in  the  plural,  of  "  Though  Heaven  should  speak  with  all  his 
wrath,"  and  be  ft  as  false  English  for  are,  though  the  rhyme 
hides  it."    Yet  all  are  good  English,  and  I  have  found  them 
all  in  Dryden' s  own  writing  !    Of  his  sins  against  idiom  I  have 
a  longer  list  than  I  have  room  for.    And  yet  he  is  one  of  our 
highest  authorities  for  real  English. 


DRYDEN  H7 

talk.1  In  verse,  he  had  a  pomp  which,  excellent 
in  itself,  became  pompousness  in  his  imitators. 
But  he  had  nothing  of  Milton's  ear  for  various 
rhythm  and  interwoven  harmony.  He  knew 
how  to  give  new  modulation,  sweetness,  and 
force  to  the  pentameter ;  but  in  what  used  to 
be  called  pindarics,  I  am  heretic  enough  to  think 
he  generally  failed.  His  so  much  praised  "Alex 
ander's  Feast "  (in  parts  of  it,  at  least)  has  no 
excuse  for  its  slovenly  metre  and  awkward  ex 
pression,  but  that  it  was  written  for  music.  He 
himself  tells  us,  in  the  epistle  dedicatory  to 
"  King  Arthur,"  "  that  the  numbers  of  poetry 
and  vocal  music  are  sometimes  so  contrary,  that 
in  many  places  I  have  been  obliged  to  cramp  my 
verses  and  make  them  rugged  to  the  reader  that 
they  may  be  harmonious  to  the  hearer."  His 
renowned  ode  suffered  from  this  constraint,  but 
this  is  no  apology  for  the  vulgarity  of  concep 
tion  in  too  many  passages.2 

1  To  see  what  he  rescued  us  from  in  pedantry  on  the  one 
hand,  and  vulgarism  on  the  other,  read  Feltham  and  Tom 
Brown  —  if  you  can. 

2  "  Cette  ode,  mise  en  musique  par  Purcell  (si  je  ne  me 
trompe),   passe  en  Angleterre   pour   le   chef-d'oeuvre  de  la 
poesie  la  plus  sublime  et  la  plus  variee;  et  je  vous  avoue  que, 
comme  je  sais  mieux  1'anglais  que  le  grec,  j'aime  cent  fois 
mieux  cette  ode   que  tout  Pindare."     (Voltaire  to  M.   de 
Chabanon,  9  mars,  1772.) 

Dryden  would  have  agreed  with  Voltaire.    When  Chief- 
Justice  Marlay,  then  a  young  Templar,  "congratulated  him 


148  DRYDEN 

Dryden's  conversion  to  Romanism  has  been 
commonly  taken  for  granted  as  insincere,  and 
has  therefore  left  an  abiding  stain  on  his  charac 
ter,  though  the  other  mud  thrown  at  him  by 
angry  opponents  or  rivals  brushed  off  so  soon  as 
it  was  dry.  But  I  think  his  change  of  faith  sus 
ceptible  of  several  explanations,  none  of  them  in 
any  way  discreditable  to  him.  Where  Church 
and  State  are  habitually  associated,  it  is  natural 
that  minds  even  of  a  high  order  should  uncon 
sciously  come  to  regard  religion  as  only  a  subt 
ler  mode  of  police.1  Dryden,  conservative  by 
nature,  had  discovered  before  Joseph  de  Maistre, 
that  Protestantism,  so  long  as  it  justified  its  name 
by  continuing  to  be  an  active  principle,  was  the 
abettor  of  Republicanism,  perhaps  the  vanguard 
of  Anarchy.  I  think  this  is  hinted  in  more  than 
one  passage  in  his  preface  to  "  The  Hind  and 
the  Panther/'  He  may  very  well  have  preferred 
Romanism  because  of  its  elder  claim  to  author 
ity  in  all  matters  of  doctrine,  but  I  think  he  had 
a  deeper  reason  in  the  constitution  of  his  own 
mind.  That  he  was  "  naturally  inclined  to  scep 
ticism  in  philosophy,"  he  tells  us  of  himself  in 

on  having  produced  the  finest  and  noblest  Ode  that  had  ever 
been  written  in  any  language,  '  You  are  right,  young  gentle 
man  [replied  Dryden],  a  nobler  Ode  never  was  produced, 
nor  ever  will.'"  (Malone.  ) 

1  This  was  true  of  Coleridge,  Wordsworth,  and  still  more 
of  Southey,  who  in  some  respects  was  not  unlike  Dryden. 


DRYDEN  H9 

the  Preface  to  the  "  Religio  Laid  "  ;  but  he  was 
a  sceptic  with  an  imaginative  side,  and  in  such 
characters  scepticism  and  superstition  play  into 
each  other's  hands.  This  finds  a  curious  illus 
tration  in  a  letter  to  his  sons,  written  four  years 
before  his  death  :  "  Towards  the  latter  end  of 
this  month,  September,  Charles  will  begin  to 
recover  his  perfect  health,  according  to  his  Na 
tivity,  which,  casting  it  myself,  I  am  sure  is  true, 
and  all  things  hitherto  have  happened  accord 
ingly  to  the  very  time  that  I  predicted  them." 
Have  we  forgotten  Montaigne's  votive  offerings 
at  the  shrine  of  Loreto  ? 

Dryden  was  short  of  body,  inclined  to  stout 
ness,  and  florid  of  complexion.  He  is  said  to 
have  had  "  a  sleepy  eye,"  but  was  handsome 
and  of  a  manly  carriage.  He  "was  not  a  very 
genteel  man,  he  was  intimate  with  none  but  poet 
ical  men.1  He  was  said  to  be  a  very  good  man 
by  all  that  knew  him  :  he  was  as  plump  as  Mr. 
Pitt,  of  a  fresh  color  and  a  down  look,  and  not 
very  conversible."  So  Pope  described  him  to 
Spence.  He  was  friendly  to  rising  merit,  as  to 

1  Pope's  notion  of  gentility  was  perhaps  expressed  in  a  letter 
from  Lord  Cobham  to  him:  "I  congratulate  you  upon  the  fine 
weather.  "Tis  a  strange  thing  that  people  of  condition  and 
men  of  parts  must  enjoy  it  in  common  with  the  rest  of  the 
world."  (Ruffhead's  Pope,  p.  276,  note.)  His  Lordship's 
naive  distinction  between  people  of  condition  and  men  of  parts 
is  as  good  as  Pope's  between  genteel  and  poetical  men.  I  fancy 
the  poet  grinning  savagely  as  he  read  it. 


i5o  DRYDEN 

Congreve,  for  instance.  Gibber  says  he  was  a 
poor  reader.  He  still  reigns  in  literary  tradition, 
as  when  at  Will's1  his  elbow-chair  had  the  best 
place  by  the  fire  in  winter,  or  on  the  balcony  in 
summer,  and  when  a  pinch  from  his  snuff-box 
made  a  young  author  blush  with  pleasure  as 
would  nowadays  a  favorable  notice  in  the  "  Sat 
urday  Review."  What  gave  and  secures  for  him 
this  singular  eminence?  To  put  it  in  a  single 
word,  I  think  that  his  qualities  and  faculties  were 
in  that  rare  combination  which  makes  character. 
This  gave  flavor  to  whatever  he  wrote  —  a  very 
rare  quality. 

Was  he,  then,  a  great  poet?  Hardly,  in  the 
narrowest  definition.  But  he  wasastrong thinker 
who  sometimes  carried  common  sense  to  a  height 
where  it  catches  the  light  of  a  diviner  air,  and 
warmed  reason  till  it  had  well-nigh  the  illuminat 
ing  property  of  intuition.  Certainly  he  is  not, 
like  Spenser,  the  poets'  poet,  but  other  men  have 
also  their  rights.  Even  the  Philistine  is  a  man 
and  a  brother,  and  is  entirely  right  so  far  as  he 
sees.  To  demand  more  of  him  is  to  be  unrea 
sonable.  And  he  sees,  among  other  things,  that 
a  man  who  undertakes  to  write  should  first  have 
a  meaning  perfectly  defined  to  himself,  and  then 
should  be  able  to  set  it  forth  clearly  in  the  best 

1    "  This  may  confine  their  younger  styles 
Whom  Dryden  pedagogues  at  Will's. " 

(Prior,  Epistle  to  Shephard,  1689.) 


DRYDEN  151 

words.  This  is  precisely  Dryden's  praise,*  and 
amid  the  rickety  sentiment  looming  big  through 
misty  phrase  which  marks  so  much  of  modern 
literature,  to  read  him  is  as  bracing  as  a  north 
west  wind.  He  blows  the  mind  clear.  In  mind 
and  manner  his  foremost  quality  is  energy.  In 
ripeness  of  mind  and  bluff  heartiness  of  expres 
sion,  he  takes  rank  with  the  best.  His  phrase  is 
always  a  short  cut  to  his  sense,  for  his  estate  was 
too  spacious  for  him  to  need  that  trick  of  wind 
ing  the  path  of  his  thought  about,  and  planting 
it  out  with  clumps  of  epithet,  by  which  the  land 
scape-gardeners  of  literature  give  to  a  paltry 
half  acre  the  air  of  a  park.  In  poetry,  to  be 
next-best  is,  in  one  sense,  to  be  nothing;  and 
yet  to  be  among  the  first  in  any  kind  of  writing, 
as  Dryden  certainly  was,  is  to  be  one  of  a  very 
small  company.  He  had,  beyond  most,  the 
gift  of  the  right  word.  And  if  he  does  not, 
like  one  or  two  of  the  greater  masters  of  song, 
stir  our  sympathies  by  that  indefinable  aroma 
so  magical  in  arousing  the  subtile  associations 
of  the  soul,  he  has  this  in  common  with  the 
few  great  writers,  that  the  winged  seeds  of  his 
thought  embed  themselves  in  the  memory  and 
germinate  there.  If  I  could  be  guilty  of  the 
absurdity  of  recommending  to  a  young  man  any 

1  "Nothing  is  truly  sublime,"  he  himself  said,  "  that  is 
not  just  and  proper."  Sir  Henry  Wotton  said  of  Sidney  that 
"his  wit  was  the  very  measure  of  congruity." 


152  DRYDEN 

author  on  whom  to  form  his  style,  I  should  tell 
him  that,  next  to  having  something  that  will  not 
stay  unsaid,  he  could  find  no  safer  guide  than 
Dryden. 

Cowper,  in  a  letter  to  Mr.  Unwin  (5th  Janu 
ary,  1782),  expresses  what  I  think  is  the  com 
mon  feeling  about  Dryden,  that,  with  all  his 
defects,  he  had  that  indefinable  something  we  call 
Genius.  "  But  I  admire  Dryden  most  [he  had 
been  speaking  of  Pope],  who  has  succeeded  by 
mere  dint  of  genius,  and  in  spite  of  a  laziness 
and  a  carelessness  almost  peculiar  to  himself. 
His  faults  are  numberless,  and  so  are  his  beau 
ties.  His  faults  are  those  of  a  great  man,  and 
his  beauties  are  such  (at  least  sometimes)  as 
Pope  with  all  his  touching  and  retouching  could 
never  equal."  But,  after  all,  perhaps  no  man 
has  summed  him  up  so  well  as  John  Dennis, 
one  of  Pope's  typical  dunces,  a  dull  man  outside 
of  his  own  sphere,  as  men  are  apt  to  be,  but  who 
had  some  sound  notions  as  a  critic,  and  thus 
became  the  object  of  Pope's  fear  and  therefore 
of  his  resentment.  Dennis  speaks  of  him  as  his 
"  departed  friend,  whom  I  infinitely  esteemed 
when  living  for  the  solidity  of  his  thought,  for 
the  spring  and  the  warmth  and  the  beautiful  turn 
of  it;  for  the  power  and  variety  and  fulness  of 
his  harmony  ;  for  the  purity,  the  perspicuity,  the 
energy  of  his  expression  ;  and,  whenever  these 
great  qualities  are  required,  for  the  pomp  and 


DRYDEN  i53 

solemnity  and  majesty  of  his  style/' f  And  yet 
there  is  something  unhappily  suggestive  in  what 
Congreve  accidentally  lets  drop  in  describing  his 
funeral,  where,  he  says,  "  We  had  an  ode  in 
Horace  sung  instead  of  David's  Psalms."  His 
burial,  he  tells  us,  "was  the  same  with  his  life: 
variety  and  not  of  a  piece  ;  the  quality  and  mob ; 
farce  and  heroics  ;  the  sublime  and  ridicule  mixt 
in  a  piece  ;  great  Cleopatra  in  a  hackney-coach/' 
I  know  not  how  true  this  may  be,  but  the  last 
phrase  better  characterizes  Dryden's  poetry  in 
four  words  than  a  page  of  disquisition  could. 
But  he  knew  how  to  "  give  his  soul  a  loose/' 
and  ours  too,  as  only  the  great  know. 

1  Dennis,  in  a  letter  to  Tonson,  1715. 


POPE 

1871 

THE  condition  of  the  English  mind  at 
the  close  of  the  seventeenth  century 
was  such  as  to  make  it  particularly  sen 
sitive  to  the  magnetism  which  streamed  to  it 
from  Paris.  The  loyalty  of  everybody  both 
in  politics  and  religion  had  been  put  out  of 
joint.  A  generation  of  materialists,  by  the 
natural  rebound  which  inevitably  follows  over- 
tension,  was  to  balance  the  ultra-spiritualism  of 
the  Puritans.  As  always  when  a  political  revo 
lution  has  been  wrought  by  moral  agencies,  the 
plunder  had  fallen  mainly  to  the  share  of  the 
greedy,  selfish  and  unscrupulous,  whose  dis 
gusting  cant  had  given  a  taint  of  hypocrisy  to 
piety  itself.  Religion,  from  a  burning  convic 
tion  of  the  soul,  had  grown  to  be  with  both 
parties  a  political  badge,  as  little  typical  of  the 
inward  man  as  the  scallop  of  a  pilgrim.  Sin 
cerity  is  impossible,  unless  it  pervade  the  whole 
being,  and  the  pretence  of  it  saps  the  very  foun 
dation  of  character.  There  seems  to  have  been 
an  universal  scepticism,  and  in  its  worst  form, 
that  is,  with  an  outward  conformity  in  the  inter 
est  of  decorum  and  order.  There  was  an  unbe 
lief  that  did  not  believe  even  in  itself. 


POPE  155 

The  difference  between  the  leading  minds  of 
the  former  age  and  that  which  was  supplanting 
it  went  to  the  very  roots  of  the  soul.  Milton 
was  willing  to  peril  the  success  of  his  crowning 
work  by  making  the  poetry  of  it  a  stalking-horse 
for  his  theological  convictions.  What  was  that 
Fame 

"  Which  the  clear  spirit  doth  raise 
To  scorn  delights  and  live  laborious  days'*  — 

to  the  crown  of  a  good  preacher  who  sets 

"  The  hearts  of  men  on  fire 
To  scorn  the  sordid  world  and  unto  heaven  aspire  "  ? 

Dean  Swift,  who  aspired  to  the  mitre,  could 
write  a  book  whose  moral,  if  it  had  any,  was 
that  one  religion  was  as  good  as  another,  since 
all  were  political  devices,  and  accepted  a  cure 
of  souls  when  it  was  more  than  doubtful  whether 
he  believed  that  his  fellow  creatures  had  any 
souls  to  be  saved,  or,  if  they  had,  whether  they 
were  worth  saving.  The  answer  which  Pulci's 
Margutte  makes  to  Morgante,  when  asked  if 
he  believed  in  Christ  or  Mahomet,  would  have 
expressed  well  enough  the  creed  of  the  majority 
of  that  generation  :  — 

"To  tell  thee  truly, 
My  faith  in  black  's  no  greater  than  in  azure, 

But  I  believe  in  capons,  roast-meat,  bouilli, 
And  in  good  wine  my  faith  's  beyond  all  measure."  * 

1  Morgante,  xviii.  115. 


156  POPE 

It  was  a  carnival  of  intellect  without  faith,  when 
men  could  be  Protestant  or  Catholic,  both  at 
once,  or  by  turns,  or  neither,  as  suited  their 
interest,  when  they  could  swear  one  allegiance 
and  keep  on  safe  terms  with  the  other,  when 
prime  ministers  and  commanders-in-chief  could 
be  intelligencers  of  the  Pretender,  nay,  when 
even  Algernon  Sidney  himself  could  be  a  pen 
sioner  of  France.  What  morality  there  was, 
was  the  morality  of  appearances,  of  the  side 
that  is  turned  toward  men  and  not  toward  God. 
The  very  shamelessness  of  Congreve  is  refresh 
ing  in  that  age  of  sham. 

It  was  impossible  that  anything  truly  great, 
that  is,  great  on  the  moral  and  emotional  as  well 
as  the  intellectual  side,  should  be  produced  by 
such  a  generation.  But  something  intellectually 
great  could  be  and  was.  The  French  mind,  al 
ways  stronger  in  perceptive  and  analytic  than  in 
imaginative  qualities,  loving  precision,  grace,  and 
finesse,  prone  to  attribute  an  almost  magical 
power  to  the  scientific  regulation  whether  of 
politics  or  religion,  had  brought  wit  and  fancy 
and  the  elegant  arts  of  society  to  as  great  per 
fection  as  was  possible  by  the  a  priori  method. 
Its  ideal  in  literature  was  to  conjure  passion 
within  the  magic  circle  of  courtliness,  or  to  com 
bine  the  appearance  of  careless  ease  and  gayety 
of  thought  with  intellectual  exactness  of  state 
ment.  The  eternal  watchfulness  of  a  wit  that 


POPE  157 

never  slept  had  made  it  distrustful  of  the  natural 
emotions  and  the  unconventional  expression 
of  them,  and  its  first  question  about  a  senti 
ment  was,  Will  it  be  safe  ?  about  a  phrase,  Will 
it  pass  with  the  Academy  ?  The  effect  of  its 
example  on  English  literature  would  appear 
chiefly  in  neatness  and  facility  of  turn,  in  point 
and  epigrammatic  compactness  of  phrase,  and 
these  in  conveying  conventional  sentiments  and 
emotions,  in  appealing  to  good  society  rather 
than  to  human  nature.  Its  influence  would  be 
greatest  where  its  success  had  been  most  marked, 
in  what  was  called  moral  poetry,  whose  chosen 
province  was  manners,  and  in  which  satire,  with 
its  avenging  scourge,  took  the  place  of  that  pro- 
founder  art  whose  office  it  was  to  purify,  not 
the  manners,  but  the  source  of  them  in  the  soul, 
by  pity  and  terror.  The  mistake  of  the  whole 
school  of  French  criticism,  it  seems  to  me,  lay 
in  its  tendency  to  confound  what  was  common 
with  what  was  vulgar,  in  a  too  exclusive  defer 
ence  to  authority  at  the  expense  of  all  free  move 
ment  of  the  mind. 

There  are  certain  defects  of  taste  which  cor 
rect  themselves  by  their  own  extravagance.  Lan 
guage,  I  suspect,  is  more  apt  to  be  reformed  by 
the  charm  of  some  master  of  it,  like  Milton, 
than  by  any  amount  of  precept.  The  influence 
of  second-rate  writers  for  evil  is  at  best  ephem 
eral,  for  true  style,  the  joint  result  of  culture 


i5»  POPE 

and  natural  aptitude,  is  always  in  fashion,  as  fine 
manners  always  are,  in  whatever  clothes.  Per 
haps  some  reform  was  needed  when  Quarles, 
who  had  no  mean  gift  of  poesy,  could  write,  — 

"  My  passion  has  no  April  in  her  eyes: 
I  cannot  spend  in  mists;   I  cannot  mizzle; 
My  fluent  brains  are  too  severe  to  drizzle 
Slight  drops."  ' 

Good  taste  is  an  excellent  thing  when  it  confines 
itself  to  its  own  rightful  province  of  the  proprie 
ties,  but  when  it  attempts  to  correct  those  pro 
found  instincts  out  of  whose  judgments  the 
higher  principles  of  aesthetics  have  been  formu 
lated,  its  success  is  a  disaster.  During  the  era 
when  the  French  theory  of  poetry  was  supreme, 
we  notice  a  decline  from  imagination  to  fancy, 
from  passion  to  wit,  from  metaphor,  which  fuses 
image  and  thought  in  one,  to  simile,  which  sets 
one  beside  the  other,  from  the  supreme  code 
of  the  natural  sympathies  to  the  parochial  by 
laws  of  etiquette.  The  imagination  instinctively 
Platonizes,  and  it  is  the  essence  of  poetry  that 
it  should  be  unconventional,  that  the  soul  of 

1  Elegie  on  Doctor  Wilson.  But  if  Quarles  had  been  led 
astray  by  the  vices  of  Donne's  manner,  he  had  good  company 
in  Herbert  and  Vaughan.  In  common  with  them,  too,  he  had 
that  luck  of  simpleness  which  is  even  more  delightful  than  wit. 
In  the  same  poem  he  says,  — 

"  Go,  glorious  soul,  and  lay  thy  temples  down 
In  Abram's  bosom,  in  tht  tacred  Joivn 
Of  soft  eternity." 


POPE  159 

it  should  subordinate  the  outward  parts ;  while 
the  artificial  method  proceeds  from  a  principle 
the  reverse  of  this,  making  the  spirit  lackey  the 
form. 

Waller  preaches  up  this  new  doctrine  in  the 
epilogue  to  the  "  Maid's  Tragedy  "  :  — 

"  Nor  is  't  less  strange  such  mighty  wits  as  those 
Should  use  a  style  in  tragedy  like  prose; 
Well-sounding  verse,  where  princes  tread  the  stage, 
Should  speak  their  virtue  and  describe  their  rage." 

That  it  should  be  beneath  the  dignity  of  princes 
to  speak  in  anything  but  rhyme  can  only  be 
paralleled  by  Mr.  Puff's  law  that  a  heroine  can 
go  decorously  mad  only  in  white  satin.  Waller, 
I  suppose,  though  with  so  loose  a  thinker  one 
cannot  be  positive, uses  "describe"  in  its  Latin 
sense  of  limitation.  Fancy  Othello  or  Lear  con 
fined  to  this  go-cart !  Phillips  touches  the  true 
point  when  he  says,  "  And  the  truth  is,  the  use 
of  measure  alone,  without  any  rime  at  all,  would 
give  far  more  ample  scope  and  liberty  both  to 
style  and  fancy  than  can  possibly  be  observed 
in  rime."  x  But  let  us  test  Waller's  method  by 
an  example  or  two.  His  monarch  made  reason 
able  thus  discourses :  — 

"  Courage  our  greatest  failings  does  supply, 
And  makes  all  good,  or  handsomely  we  die. 
Life  is  a  thing  of  common  use;  by  heaven 
As  well  to  insects  as  to  monarchs  given; 

1  Preface  to  the  Theatrum. 


160  POPE 

But  for  the  crown,  't  is  a  more  sacred  thing; 

I  '11  dying  lose  it,  or  I  Ml  live  a  king. 

Come,  Diphilus,  we  must  together  walk 

And  of  a  matter  of  importance  talk."        [Exeunt. 

Blank  verse,  where  the  sentiment  is  trivial  as 
here,  merely  removes  prose  to  a  proper  ideal 
distance,  where  it  is  in  keeping  with  more  im 
passioned  parts,  but  commonplace  set  to  this 
rocking-horse  jog  irritates  the  nerves.  There  is 
nothing  here  to  remind  us  of  the  older  tragic 
style  but  the  exeunt  at  the  close.  Its  pithy  con 
ciseness  and  the  relief  which  it  brings  us  from 
his  majesty 's  prosing  give  it  an  almost  poetical 
savor.  Aspatia's  reflections  upon  suicide  (or 
"suppressing  our  breath,"  as  she  calls  it),  in 
the  same  play,  will  make  few  readers  regret  that 
Shakespeare  was  left  to  his  own  unassisted  bar 
barism  when  he  wrote  Hamlet's  soliloquy  on 
the  same  topic :  — 

"  'T  was  in  compassion  of  our  woe 
That  Nature  first  made  poisons  grow, 
For  hopeless  wretches  such  as  I 
Kindly  providing  means  to  die: 
As  mothers  do  their  children  keep, 
So  Nature  feeds  and  makes  us  sleep. 
The  indisposed  she  does  invite 
To  go  to  bed  before  't  is  night." 

Correctness  in  this  case  is  but  a  synonym  of 
monotony,  and  words  are  chosen  for  the  num 
ber  of  their  syllables,  for  their  rubbishy  value 


POPE  161 

tc  fill-in,  instead  of  being  forced  upon  the  poet 
by  the  meaning  which  occupies  the  mind.  Lan 
guage  becomes  useful  for  its  diluting  properties, 
rather  than  as  the  medium  by  means  of  which 
the  thought  or  fancy  precipitate  themselves  in 
crystals  upon  a  connecting  thread  of  purpose. 
Let  us  read  a  few  verses  from  Beaumont  and 
Fletcher,  that  we  may  feel  fully  the  difference 
between  the  rude  and  the  reformed  styles.  This 
also  shall  be  a  speech  of  Aspatia's.  Antiphila, 
one  of  her  maidens,  is  working  the  story  of 
Theseus  and  Ariadne  in  tapestry,  for  the  older 
masters  loved  a  picturesque  background  and 
knew  the  value  of  fanciful  accessories.  Aspatia 

thinks  the  face  of  Ariadne  not  sad  enough  :  — 

i 

"  Do  it  by  me, 

Do  it  again  by  me,  the  lost  Aspatia, 

And  you  shall  find  all  true  but  the  wild  island. 

Suppose  I  stand  upon  the  seabeach  now, 

Mine  arms  thus,  and  my  hair  blown  with  the  wind, 

Wild  as  that  desert;   and  let  all  about  me 

Be  teachers  of  my  story.    Do  my  face 

(If  ever  thou  hadst  feeling  of  a  sorrow) 

Thus,  thus,  Antiphila;  strive  to  make  me  look 

Like  sorrow's  monument;  and  the  trees  about  me 

Let  them  be  dry  and  leafless;  let  the  rocks 

Groan  with  continual  surges;  and  behind  me 

Make  all  a  desolation." 

What  instinctive  felicity  of  versification  !  what 
sobbing  breaks  and  passionate  repetitions  are 
here! 


i6z  POPE 

We  see  what  the  direction  of  the  new  tend 
ency  was,  but  it  would  be  an  inadequate  or  a 
dishonest  criticism  that  should  hold  Pope  re 
sponsible  for  the  narrow  compass  of  the  instru 
ment  which  was  his  legacy  from  his  immediate 
predecessors,  any  more  than  for  the  wearisome 
thrumming-over  of  his  tune  by  those  who  came 
after  him  and  who  had  caught  his  technical  skill 
without  his  genius.  The  question  properly  stated 
is,  How  much  was  it  possible  to  make  of  the 
material  supplied  by  the  age  in  which  he  lived  P 
and  how  much  did  he  make  of  it  ?  Thus  far, 
among  the  great  English  poets  who  preceded 
him,  we  have  seen  actual  life  represented  by 
Chaucer,  imaginative  life  by  Spenser,  ideal  life 
by  Shakespeare,  the  interior  life  by  Milton. 
But  as  everything  aspires  to  a  rhythmical  utter 
ance  of  itself,  so  conventional  life,  itself  a  new 
phenomenon,  was  waiting  for  its  poet.  It  found 
or  made  a  most  fitting  one  in  Pope.  He  stands 
for  exactness  of  intellectual  expression,  for  per 
fect  propriety  of  phrase  (I  speak  of  him  at  his 
best),  and  is  a  striking  instance  how  much  suc 
cess  and  permanence  of  reputation  depend  on 
conscientious  finish  as  well  as  on  native  endow 
ment.  Butler  asks, — 

'•'  Then  why  should  those  who  pick  and  choose 
The  best  of  all  the  best  compose, 
And  join  it  by  Mosaic  art, 
In  graceful  order,  part  to  part, 


POPE  163 

To  make  the  whole  in  beauty  suit, 
Not  merit  as  complete  repute 
As  those  who,  with  less  art  and  pain, 
Can  do  it  with  their  native  brain  ?  " 

Butler  knew  very  well  that  precisely  what  stamps 
a  man  as  an  artist  is  this  power  of  finding  out 
what  is  "the  best  of  all  the  best." 

I  confess  that  I  come  to  the  treatment  of 
Pope  with  diffidence.  I  was  brought  up  in  the 
old  superstition  that  he  was  the  greatest  poet 
that  ever  lived ;  and  when  I  came  to  find  that 
I  had  instincts  of  my  own,  and  my  mind  was 
brought  in  contact  with  the  apostles  of  a  more 
esoteric  doctrine  of  poetry,  I  felt  that  ardent 
desire  for  smashing  the  idols  I  had  been  brought 
up  to  worship,  without  any  regard  to  their  artis 
tic  beauty,  which  characterizes  youthful  zeal. 
What  was  it  to  me  that  Pope  was  called  a  master 
of  style  ?  I  felt,  as  Addison  says  in  his  "  Free 
holder  "  when  answering  an  argument  in  favor 
of  the  Pretender  because  he  could  speak  English 
and  George  I.  could  not,  "that  I  did  not  wish 
to  be  tyrannized  over  in  the  best  English  that 
ever  was  spoken."  The  young  demand  thoughts 
that  find  an  echo  in  their  real  and  not  their 
acquired  nature,  and  care  very  little  about  the 
dress  they  are  put  in.  It  is  later  that  we  learn 
to  like  the  conventional,  as  we  do  olives.  There 
was  a  time  when  I  could  not  read  Pope,  but  dis 
liked  him  on  principle,  as  old  Roger  Ascham 


164  POPE 

seems  to  have  felt  about  Italy  when  he  says, 
"  I  was  once  in  Italy  myself,  but  I  thank  God 
my  abode  there  was  only  nine  days." 

But  Pope  fills  a  very  important  place  in  the 
history  of  English  poetry,  and  must  be  studied 
by  every  one  who  would  come  to  a  clear  know 
ledge  of  it.  I  have  since  read  over  every  line 
that  Pope  ever  wrote,  and  every  letter  written 
by  or  to  him,  and  that  more  than  once.  If  I 
have  not  come  to  the  conclusion  that  he  is  the 
greatest  of  poets,  I  believe  that  I  am  at  least  in 
a  condition  to  allow  him  every  merit  that  is 
fairly  his.  I  have  said  that  Pope  as  a  literary 
man  represents  precision  and  grace  of  expres 
sion  ;  but  as  a  poet  he  represents  something 
more,  —  nothing  less,  namely,  than  one  of  those 
eternal  controversies  of  taste  which  will  last 
as  long  as  the  imagination  and  understanding 
divide  men  between  them.  It  is  not  a  matter  to 
be  settled  by  any  amount  of  argument  or  demon 
stration.  There  are  born  Popists  or  Words- 
worthians,  Lockists  or  Kantists,  and  there  is 
nothing  more  to  be  said  of  the  matter. 

Wordsworth  was  not  in  a  condition  to  do 
Pope  justice.  A  man  brought  up  in  sublime 
mountain  solitudes,  and  whose  nature  was  a  soli 
tude  more  vast  than  they,  walking  on  earth 
which  quivered  with  the  throe  of  the  French 
Revolution,  the  child  of  an  era  of  profound 
mental  and  moral  movement,  it  could  not  be 


POPE  165 

expected  that  he  should  be  in  sympathy  with 
the  poet  of  artificial  life.  Moreover,  he  was 
the  apostle  of  imagination,  and  came  at  a  time 
when  the  school  which  Pope  founded  had  de 
generated  into  a  mob  of  mannerists  who  wrote 
with  ease,  and  who  with  their  congenial  critics 
united  at  once  to  decry  poetry  which  brought 
in  the  dangerous  innovation  of  having  a  soul 
in  it. 

But  however  it  may  be  with  poets,  it  is  very 
certain  that  a  reader  is  happiest  whose  mind  is 
broad  enough  to  enjoy  the  natural  school  for  its 
nature,  and  the  artificial  for  its  artificiality,  pro 
vided  they  be  only  good  of  their  kind.  At  any 
rate,  we  must  allow  that  the  man  who  can  pro 
duce  one  perfect  work  is  either  a  great  genius  or 
a  very  lucky  one  ;  and  so  far  as  we  who  read  are 
concerned,  it  is  of  secondary  importance  which. 
And  Pope  has  done  this  in  the  "Rape  of  the 
Lock."  For  wit,  fancy,  invention,  and  keeping, 
it  has  never  been  surpassed.  I  do  not  say  there 
is  in  it  poetry  of  the  highest  order,  or  that 
Pope  is  a  poet  whom  any  one  would  choose  as 
the  companion  of  his  best  hours.  There  is  no 
inspiration  in  it,  no  trumpet-call,  but  for  pure 
entertainment  it  is  unmatched.  There  are  two 
kinds  of  genius.  The  first  and  highest  may  be 
said  to  speak  out  of  the  eternal  to  the  present, 
and  must  compel  its  age  to  understand  //  ;  the 
second  understands  its  age,  and  tells  it  what  it 


i66  POPE 

wishes  to  be  told.  Let  us  find  strength  and 
inspiration  in  the  one,  amusement  and  instruc 
tion  in  the  other,  and  be  honestly  thankful  for 
both. 

The  very  earliest  of  Pope's  productions  give 
indications  of  that  sense  and  discretion,  as  well  as 
wit,  which  afterward  so  eminently  distinguished 
him.  The  facility  of  expression  is  remarkable, 
and  we  find  also  that  perfect  balance  of  metre, 
which  he  afterward  carried  so  far  as  to  be  weari 
some.  His  pastorals  were  written  in  his  six 
teenth  year,  and  their  publication  immediately 
brought  him  into  notice.  The  following  four 
verses  from  his  first  pastoral  are  quite  character 
istic  in  their  antithetic  balance  :  — 

"  You  that,  too  wise  for  pride,  too  good  for  power, 
Enjoy  the  glory  to  be  great  no  more, 
And  carrying  with  you  all  the  world  can  boast, 
To  all  the  world  illustriously  are  lost!" 

The  sentiment  is  affected,  and  reminds  one  of 
that  future  period  of  Pope's  Correspondence 
with  his  Friends,  when  Swift,  his  heart  corrod 
ing  with  disappointed  ambition  at  Dublin, 
Bolingbroke  raising  delusive  turnips  at  his 
farm,  and  Pope  pretending  not  to  feel  the 
lampoons  which  embittered  his  life,  played  to 
gether  the  solemn  farce  of  affecting  indifference 
to  the  world  by  which  it  would  have  agonized 
them  to  be  forgotten,  and  wrote  letters  ad 
dressed  to  each  other,  but  really  intended  for 


POPE  167 

that  posterity  whose  opinion  they  assumed  to 
despise. 

In  these  pastorals  there  is  an  entire  want 
of  nature.  For  example,  in  that  on  the  death  of 
Mrs.  Tempest :  — 

«'  Her  fate  is  whispered  by  the  gentle  breeze 
And  told  in  sighs  to  all  the  trembling  trees; 
The  trembling  trees,  in  every  plain  and  wood, 
Her  fate  remurmur  to  the  silver  flood; 
The  silver  flood,  so  lately  calm,  appears 
Swelled  with  new  passion,  and  o'erflows  with  tears; 
The  winds  and  trees  and  floods  her  death  deplore, 
Daphne,  our  grief!  our  glory  now  no  more  !  " 

All  this  is  as  perfectly  professional  as  the  mourn 
ing  of  an  undertaker.  Still  worse.  Pope  materi 
alizes  and  makes  too  palpably  objective  that 
sympathy  which  our  grief  forces  upon  outward 
nature.  Milton,  before  making  the  echoes 
mourn  for  Lycidas,  puts  our  feelings  in  tune, 
as  it  were,  and  hints  at  his  own  imagination  as 
the  source  of  this  emotion  in  inanimate  things, — 

"  But,  O  the  heavy  change  now  thou  art  gone!  " 

In  "  Windsor  Forest  "  we  find  the  same  thing 
again  :  — 

"  Here  his  first  lays  majestic  Denham  sung, 

There  the  last  numbers  flowed  from  Cowley's  tongue; 
O  early  lost,  what  tears  the  river  shed 
When  the  sad  pomp  along  his  banks  was  led! 
His  drooping  swans  on  every  note  expire, 
And  on  his  'Billows  hung  each  muse's  lyre!" 


168  POPE 

In  the  same  poem  he  indulges  the  absurd 
conceit  that,  — 

"  Beasts  urged  by  us,  their  fellow  beasts  pursue, 
And  learn  of  man  each  other  to  undo  ";  — 

and  in  the  succeeding  verses  gives  some  striking 
instances  of  that  artificial  diction,  so  inappropri 
ate  to  poems  descriptive  of  natural  objects  and 
ordinary  life,  which  brought  verse-making  to 
such  a  depth  of  absurdity  in  the  course  of  the 
century. 

«'  With  slaughtering  guns,  the  unwearied  fowler  roves 
Where  frosts  have  whitened  all  the  naked  groves; 
Where  doves  in  flocks  the  leafless  trees  o'ershade, 
And  lonely  woodcocks  haunt  the  watery  glade; 
He  lifts  the  tube  and  levels  with  his  eye, 
Straight  a  short  thunder  breaks  the  frozen  sky: 
Oft  as  in  airy  rings  they  skim  the  heath, 
The  clamorous  lapwings  feel  the  leaden  death; 
Oft  as  the  mounting  larks  their  notes  prepare, 
They  fall  and  leave  their  little  lives  in  air." 

Now  one  would  imagine  that  the  tube  of  the 
fowler  was  a  telescope  instead  of  a  gun.  And 
think  of  the  larks  preparing  their  notes  like  a 
country  choir !  Yet  even  here  there  are  admir 
able  lines,  — 

"  Oft  as  in  airy  rings  they  skim  the  heath,*' 

"  They  fall  and  leave  their  little  lives  in  air,"  — 

for  example. 

In   Pope's  next  poem,  the  "Essay  on  Criti 
cism,'*  the  wit  and  poet  become  apparent.    It  is 


POPE  169 

full  of  clear  thoughts,  compactly  expressed.  In 
this  poem,  written  when  Pope  was  only  twenty- 
one,  occur  some  of  those  lines  which  have  be 
come  proverbial ;  such  as 

"  A  little  learning  is  a  dangerous  thing'*; 

"  For  fools  rush  in  where  angels  fear  to  tread  "; 

"  True  wit  is  Nature  to  advantage  dressed, 

What  oft  was  thought,  but  ne'er  so  well  expressed." 

"  For  each  ill  author  is  as  bad  a  friend." 

In  all  of  these  we  notice  that  terseness  in  which 
(regard  being  had  to  his  especial  range  of  thought) 
Pope  has  never  been  equalled.  One  cannot  help 
being  struck  also  with  the  singular  discretion 
which  the  poem  gives  evidence  of.  I  do  not 
know  where  to  look  for  another  author  in  whom 
it  appeared  so  early;  and,  considering  the  vi 
vacity  of  his  mind  and  the  constantly  besetting 
temptation  of  his  wit,  it  is  still  more  wonderful. 
In  his  boyish  correspondence  with  poor  old 
Wycherley,  one  would  suppose  him  to  be  the 
man  and  Wycherley  the  youth.  Pope's  under 
standing  was  no  less  vigorous  (when  not  the 
dupe  of  his  nerves)  than  his  fancy  was  light 
some  and  sprightly. 

I  come  now  to  what  in  itself  would  be  enough 
to  have  immortalized  him  as  a  poet,  the  "  Rape 
of  the  Lock,"  in  which,  indeed,  he  appears  more 
purely  as  poet  than  in  any  other  of  his  produc 
tions.  Elsewhere  he  has  shown  more  force,  more 


i  ;o  POPE 

wit,  more  reach  of  thought,  but  nowhere  such  a 
truly  artistic  combination  of  elegance  and  fancy. 
His  genius  has  here  found  its  true  direction, 
and  the  very  same  artificiality,  which  in  his  pas 
torals  was  unpleasing,  heightens  the  effect,  and 
adds  to  the  general  keeping.  As  truly  as  Shake 
speare  is  the  poet  of  man,  as  God  made  him, 
dealing  with  great  passions  and  innate  motives, 
so  truly  is  Pope  the  poet  of  society,  the  deline 
ator  of  manners,  the  exposer  of  those  motives 
which  may  be  called  acquired,  whose  spring  is 
in  institutions  and  habits  of  purely  worldly 
origin. 

The  "  Rape  of  the  Lock "  was  written  in 
Pope's  twenty-fourth  year,  and  the  machinery  of 
the  Sylphs  was  added  at  the  suggestion  of  Dr. 
Garth, —  a  circumstance  for  which  we  can  feel 
a  more  unmixed  gratitude  to  him  than  for  writ 
ing  the  "  Dispensary."  The  idea  was  taken  from 
that  entertaining  book  "  The  Count  de  Gabalis," 
in  which  Fouque  afterward  found  the  hint  for 
his  "Undine";  but  the  little  sprites  as  they 
appear  in  the  poem  are  purely  the  creation  of 
Pope's  fancy. 

The  theory  of  the  poem  is  excellent.  The 
heroic  is  out  of  the  question  in  fine  society.  It 
is  perfectly  true  that  almost  every  door  we 
pass  in  the  street  closes  upon  its  private  tragedy, 
but  the  moment  a  great  passion  enters  a  man 
he  passes  at  once  out  of  the  artificial  into  the 


POPE  171 

human.  So  long  as  he  continues  artificial,  the 
sublime  is  a  conscious  absurdity  to  him.  The 
mock-heroic  then  is  the  only  way  in  which  the 
petty  actions  and  sufferings  of  the  fine  world 
can  be  epically  treated,  and  the  contrast  continu 
ally  suggested  with  subjects  of  larger  scope  and 
more  dignified  treatment,  makes  no  small  part 
of  the  pleasure  and  sharpens  the  point  of  the 
wit.  The  invocation  is  admirable  :  — 

"  Say,  what  strange  motive,  Goddess,  could  compel, 
A  well-bred  lord  to  assault  a  gentle  belle  ? 
O  say  what  stranger  cause,  yet  unexplored, 
Could  make  a  gentle  belle  reject  a  lord  ?  " 

The  keynote  of  the  poem  is  here  struck,  and  we 
are  able  to  put  ourselves  in  tune  with  it.  It  is  not 
a  parody  of  the  heroic  style,  but  only  a  setting 
it  in  satirical  juxtaposition  with  cares  and  events 
and  modes  of  thought  with  which  it  is  in  com 
ical  antipathy,  and  while  //  is  not  degraded,  they 
are  shown  in  their  triviality.  The  "  clouded 
cane,"  as  compared  with  the  Homeric  spear, 
indicates  the  difference  of  scale,  the  lower  plane 
of  emotions  and  passions.  The  opening  of  the 
action,  too,  is  equally  good  :  — 

"  Sol  through  white  curtains  shot  a  timorous  ray, 
And  oped  those  eyes  that  must  eclipse  the  day, 
Now  lapdogs  give  themselves  the  rousing  shake, 
And  sleepless  lovers  just  at  twelve  awake; 
Thrice  rung  the  bell,  the  slipper  knocked  the  ground, 
And  the  pressed  watch  returned  a  silver  sound." 


i?*  POPE 

The  mythology  of  the  Sylphs  is  full  of  the  most 
fanciful  wit ;  indeed,  wit  infused  with  fancy  is 
Pope's  peculiar  merit.  The  Sylph  is  addressing 
Belinda :  — 

«« Know,  then,  unnumbered  spirits  round  thee  fly, 
The  light  militia  of  the  lower  sky; 
These,  though  unseen,  are  ever  on  the  wing, 
Hang  o'er  the  box  and  hover  round  the  ring. 
As  now  your  own  our  beings  were  of  old, 
And  once  enclosed  in  woman's  beauteous  mould; 
Think  not,  when  woman's  transient  breath  is  fled, 
That  all  her  vanities  at  once  are  dead; 
Succeeding  vanities  she  still  regards, 
And,  though  she  plays  no  more,  o'erlooks  the  cards. 
For  when  the  fair  in  all  their  pride  expire, 
To  their  first  elements  their  souls  retire; 
The  sprites  of  fiery  termagants  in  flame 
Mount  up  and  take  a  salamander's  name; 
Soft  yielding  nymphs  to  water  glide  away 
And  sip,  with  nymphs,  their  elemental  tea; 
The  graver  prude  sinks  downward  to  a  gnome, 
In  search  of  mischief  still  on  earth  to  roam; 
The  light  coquettes  in  sylphs  aloft  repair 
And  sport  and  flutter  in  the  fields  of  air." 

And  the  contrivance  by  which  Belinda  is  awak 
ened  is  also  perfectly  in  keeping  with  all  the 
rest  of  the  machinery  :  — 

"  He  said:   when  Shock,  who  thought  she  slept  too  long, 
Leaped  up  and  waked  his  mistress  with  his  tongue; 
'Twas  then,  Belinda,  if  report  say  true, 
Thy  eyes  first  opened  on  a  billet-doux." 

Throughout  this  poem  the  satiric  wit  of  Pope 


POPE  173 

peeps  out  in  the  pleasantest  little  smiling 
ways,  as  where,  in  describing  the  toilet-table, 
he  says  :  — 

"  Here  files  of  pins  extend  their  shining  rows, 
Puffs,  powders,  patches,  Bibles,  billet-doux." 

Or  when,  after  the  fatal  lock  has  been  sev 
ered, — 

"  Then  flashed  the  living  lightning  from  her  eyes, 
And  screams  of  horror  rend  the  affrighted  skies, 
Not  louder  shrieks  to  pitying  Heaven  are  cast 
When  husbands  or  when  lapdogs  breathe  their  last; 
Or  when  rich  china-vessels,  fallen  from  high, 
In  glittering  dust  and  painted  fragments  lie!  " 

And  so,  when  the  conflict  begins  :  — 

"  Now  Jove  suspends  his  golden  scales  in  air; 
Weighs  the  men's  wits  against  the  ladies'  hair; 
The  doubtful  beam  long  nods  from  side  to  side; 
At  length  the  wits  mount  up,  the  hairs  subside." 

But  more  than  the  wit  and  fancy,  I  think,  the 
perfect  keeping  of  the  poem  deserves  admiration. 
Except  a  touch  of  grossness,  here  and  there, 
there  is  the  most  pleasing  harmony  in  all  the 
conceptions  and  images.  The  punishments 
which  he  assigns  to  the  Sylphs  who  neglect 
their  duty  are  charmingly  appropriate  and  in 
genious  :  — 

"Whatever  spirit,  careless  of  his  charge, 
His  post  neglects,  or  leaves  the  fair  at  large, 
Shall  feel  sharp  vengeance  soon  o'ertake  his  sins; 
Be  stopped  in  vials  or  transfixed  with  pins, 


174  POPE 

Or  plunged  in  lakes  of  bitter  washes  lie, 
Or  wedged  whole  ages  in  a  bodkin's  eye; 
Gums  and  pomatums  shall  his  flight  restrain, 
While  clogged  he  beats  his  silver  wings  in  vain; 
Or  alum  styptics  with  contracting  power, 
Shrink  his  thin  essence  like  a  rivelled  flower; 
Or  as  Ixion  fixed  the  wretch  shall  feel 
The  giddy  motion  of  the  whirling  wheel, 
In  fumes  of  burning  chocolate  shall  glow, 
And  tremble  at  the  sea  that  froths  below!  " 

The  speech  of  Thalestris,  too,  with  its  droll 
climax,  is  equally  good  :  — 

"  Mcthinks  already  I  your  tears  survey, 
Already  hear  the  horrid  things  they  say, 
Already  see  you  a  degraded  toast, 
And  all  your  honor  in  a  whisper  lost! 
How  shall  I  then  your  helpless  fame  defend  ? 
'T  will  then  be  infamy  to  seem  your  friend! 
And  shall  this  prize,  the  inestimable  prize, 
Exposed  through  crystal  to  the  gazing  eyes, 
And  heightened  by  the  diamond's  circling  rays, 
On  that  rapacious  hand  forever  blaze  ? 
Sooner  shall  grass  in  Hydepark  Circus  grow, 
And  wits  take  lodging  in  the  sound  of  Bow, 
Sooner  let  earth,  air,  sea,  in  chaos  fall, 
Men,  monkeys,  lapdogs,  parrots,  perish  all!" 

So    also    Belinda's    account     of  the    morning 
omens:  — 

'« *T  was  this  the  morning  omens  seemed  to  tell; 
Thrice  from  my  trembling  hand  the  patch-box  fell; 
The  tottering  china  shook  without  a  wind; 
Nay,  Poll  sat  mute,  and  Shock  was  most  unkind." 


POPE  175 

The  idea  of  the  goddess  of  Spleen,  and  of  her 
palace,  where 

"  The  dreaded  East  is  all  the  wind  that  blows,"  — 

was  a  very  happy  one.  In  short,  the  whole  poem 
more  truly  deserves  the  name  of  a  creation  than 
anything  Pope  ever  wrote.  The  action  is  con- 
fined  to  a  world  of  his  own,  the  supernatural 
agency  is  wholly  of  his  own  contrivance,  and 
nothing  is  allowed  to  overstep  the  limitations  of 
the  subject.  It  ranks  by  itself  as  one  of  the 
purest  works  of  human  fancy  ;  whether  that 
fancy  be  strictly  poetical  or  not  is  another  mat 
ter.  If  we  compare  it  with  the  cc  Midsummer 
Night's  Dream/'  an  uncomfortable  doubt  is  sug 
gested.  The  perfection  of  form  in  the  "  Rape  of 
the  Lock  "  is  to  me  conclusive  evidence  that  in 
it  the  natural  genius  of  Pope  found  fuller  and 
freer  expression  than  in  any  other  of  his  poems. 
The  others  are  aggregates  of  brilliant  passages 
rather  than  harmonious  wholes. 

It  is  a  droll  illustration  of  the  inconsistencies 
of  human  nature,  a  more  profound  satire  than 
Pope  himself  ever  wrote,  that  his  fame  should 
chiefly  rest  upon  the  "  Essay  on  Man."  It  has 
been  praised  and  admired  by  men  of  the  most 
opposite  beliefs,  and  men  of  no  belief  at  all. 
Bishops  and  free-thinkers  have  met  here  on  a 
common  ground  of  sympathetic  approval.  And, 
indeed,  there  is  no  particular  faith  in  it.  It  is  a 


,76  POPE 

droll  medley  of  inconsistent  opinions.  It  proves 
only  two  things  beyond  a  question,  —  that  Pope 
was  not  a  great  thinker ;  and  that  wherever 
he  found  a  thought,  no  matter  what,  he  could 
express  it  so  tersely,  so  clearly,  and  with  such 
smoothness  of  versification  as  to  give  it  an  ever 
lasting  currency.  Hobbes's  unwieldy  "  Levia 
than,"  left  stranded  there  on  the  shore  of  the 
last  age,  and  nauseous  with  the  stench  of  its 
selfishness, — from  this  Pope  distilled  a  fragrant 
oil  with  which  to  fill  the  brilliant  lamps  of  his 
philosophy,  —  lamps  like  those  in  the  tombs 
of  alchemists,  that  go  out  the  moment  the 
healthy  air  is  let  in  upon  them.  The  only  posi 
tive  Doctrines  in  the  poem  are  the  selfishness  of 
Hobbes  set  to  music,  and  the  Pantheism  of 
Spinoza  brought  down  from  mysticism  to  com 
monplace.  Nothing  can  be  more  absurd  than 
many  of  the  dogmas  taught  in  this  "  Essay  on 
Man."  For  example,  Pope  affirms  explicitly 
that  instinct  is  something  better  than  reason:  — 

•'  See  him  from  Nature  rising  slow  to  art, 
To  copy  instinct  then  was  reason's  part; 
Thus,  then,  to  man  the  voice  of  Nature  spake;  — 
Go,  from  the  creatures  thy  instructions  take; 
Learn  from  the  beasts  what  food  the  thickets  yield; 
Learn  from  the  birds  the  physic  of  the  field; 
The  arts  of  building  from  the  bee  receive; 
Learn  of  the  mole  to  plough,  the  worm  to  weave; 
Learn  of  the  little  nautilus  to  sail, 
Spread  the  thin  oar,  or  catch  the  driving  gale.*' 


POPE  177 

I  say  nothing  of  the  quiet  way  in  which  the 
general  term  "  Nature  "  is  substituted  for  God, 
but  how  unutterably  void  of  reasonableness  is 
the  theory  that  Nature  would  have  left  her  high 
est  product,  man,  destitute  of  that  instinct  with 
which  she  had  endowed  her  other  creatures  ! 
As  if  reason  were  not  the  most  sublimated  form 
of  instinct.  The  accuracy  on  which  Pope  prided 
himself,  and  for  which  he  is  commended,  was 
not  accuracy  of  thought  so  much  as  of  expres 
sion.  And  he  cannot  always  even  claim  this 
merit,  but  only  that  of  correct  rhyme,  as  in  one 
of  the  passages  I  have  already  quoted  from  the 
"  Rape  of  the  Lock  "  he  talks  of  casting  shrieks 
to  heaven,  —  a  performance  of  some  difficulty, 
except  when  cast  is  needed  to  rhyme  with 
last. 

But  the  supposition  is  that  in  the  "  Essay  on 
Man  "  Pope  did  not  himself  know  what  he  was 
writing.  He  was  only  the  condenser  and  epi- 
grammatizer  of  Bolingbroke,  —  a  very  fitting 
St.  John  for  such  a  gospel.  Or,  if  he  did  know, 
we  can  account  for  the  contradictions  by  sup 
posing  that  he  threw  in  some  of  the  common 
place  moralities  to  conceal  his  real  drift.  John 
son  asserts  that  Bolingbroke  in  private  laughed 
at  Pope's  having  been  made  the  mouthpiece  of 
opinions  which  he  did  not  hold.  But  this  is 
hardly  probable  when  we  consider  the  relations 
between  them.  It  is  giving  Pope  altogether  too 


i?«  POPE 

little  credit  for  intelligence  to  suppose  that  he 
did  not  understand  the  principles  of  his  intimate 
friend.  The  caution  with  which  he  at  first  con 
cealed  the  authorship  would  argue  that  he  had 
doubts  as  to  the  reception  of  the  poem.  When 
it  was  attacked  on  the  score  of  infidelity,  he 
gladly  accepted  Warburton's  championship,  and 
assumed  whatever  pious  interpretation  he  con 
trived  to  thrust  upon  it.  The  beginning  of  the 
poem  is  familiar  to  everybody  :  — 

"  Awake,  my  St.  John,  leave  all  meaner  things 
To  low  ambition  and  the  pride  of  kings; 
Let  us  (since  life  can  little  more  supply 
Than  just  to  look  about  us  and  to  die) 
Expatiate  free  o'er  all  this  scene  of  man, 
A  mighty  maze,  —  but  not  without  a  plan." 

To  expatiate  o'er  a  mighty  maze  is  rather  loose 
writing,  but  the  last  verse,  as  it  stood  in  the 
original  editions,  was, - 

"  A  mighty  maze  of  walks  without  a  plan  "  ;  — 

and  perhaps  this  came  nearer  Pope's  real  opin 
ion  than  the  verse  he  substituted  for  it.  Warbur- 
ton  is  careful  not  to  mention  this  variation  in  his 
notes.  The  poem  is  everywhere  as  remarkable 
for  its  confusion  of  logic  as  it  often  is  for  ease 
of  verse  and  grace  of  expression.  An  instance 
of  both  occurs  in  a  passage  frequently  quoted  :  — 

"  Heaven  from  all  creatures  hides  the  book  of  fate; 
All  but  the  page  prescribed,  their  presci.t  state; 


POPE  179 

From  brutes  what  men,  from  men  what  spirits  know, 

Or  who  would  suffer  being  here  below  ? 

The  lamb  thy  riot  dooms  to  bleed  to-day, 

Had  he  thy  reason,  would  he  skip  and  play  ? 

Pleased  to  the  last,  he  crops  the  flowery  food, 

And  licks  the  hand  just  raised  to  shed  his  blood. 

O,  blindness  to  the  future  kindly  given 

That  each  may  fill  the  circle  meant  by  heaven  ! 

Who  sees  with  equal  eye,  as  God  of  all, 

A  hero  perish  or  a  sparrow  fall, 

Atoms  or  systems  into  ruin  hurled, 

And  now  a  bubble  burst,  and  now  a  world  !  " 

Now,  if  "  heaven  from  all  creatures  hides  the 
book  of  fate,"  why  should  not  the  lamb  "  skip 
and  play,"  if  he  had  the  reason  of  man  ?  Why, 
because  he  would  then  be  able  to  read  the  book 
of  fate.  But  if  man  himself  cannot,  why,  then, 
could  the  lamb  with  the  reason  of  man  ?  For, 
if  the  lamb  had  the  reason  of  man,  the  book  of 
fate  would  still  be  hidden,  so  far  as  himself  was 
concerned.  If  the  inferences  we  can  draw  from 
appearances  are  equivalent  to  a  knowledge  of 
destiny,  the  knowing  enough  to  take  an  um 
brella  in  cloudy  weather  might  be  called  so. 
There  is  a  manifest  confusion  between  what  we 
know  about  ourselves  and  about  other  people ; 
the  whole  point  of  the  passage  being  that  we  are 
always  mercifully  blinded  to  our  own  future, 
however  much  reason  we  may  possess.  There 
is  also  inaccuracy  as  well  as  inelegance  in  say 
ing*— 


i8o  POPE 

«'  Heaven, 

#7/<?  sees  with  equal  eye,  as  God  of  all, 
A  hero  perish  or  a  sparrow  fall." 

To  the  last  verse  Warburton,  desirous  of  recon 
ciling  his  author  with  Scripture,  appends  a  note 
referring  to  Matthew  x.  29  :  "  Are  not  two  spar 
rows  sold  for  one  farthing  ?  and  one  of  them 
shall  not  fall  to  the  ground  without  your  Father." 
It  would  not  have  been  safe  to  have  referred  to 
the  thirty-first  verse  :  "  Fear  ye  not,  therefore, 
ye  are  of  more  value  than  many  sparrows." 

To  my  feeling,  one  of  the  most  beautiful 
passages  in  the  whole  poem  is  that  familiar 
one :  — 

"  Lo,  the  poor  Indian  whose  untutored  mind 
Sees  God  in  clouds,  or  hears  him  in  the  wind, 
His  soul  proud  science  never  taught  to  stray 
Far  as  the  solar  walk  or  milky  way: 
Yet  simple  Nature  to  his  hope  has  given 
Behind  the  cloud-topt  hill  a  humbler  heaven; 
Some  safer  world  in  depth  of  woods  embraced, 
Some  happier  island  in  the  watery  waste, 
Where  slaves  once  more  their  native  land  behold, 
No  fiends  torment,  no  Christians  thirst  for  gold. 
To  be  contents  his  natural  desire, 
He  asks  no  angel's  wing,  no  seraph's  fire, 
But  thinks,  admitted  to  that  equal  sky, 
His  faithful  dog  shall  bear  him  company.'* 

But  this  comes  in  as  a  corollary  to  what  went 
just  before :  — 


POPE  181 

"  Hope  springs  eternal  in  the  human  breast, 
Man  never  is  but  always  to  be  blest; 
The  soul,  uneasy,  and  confined  from  home, 
Rests  and  expatiates  in  a  life  to  come." 

Then  follows  immediately  the  passage  about  the 
poor  Indian,  who,  after  all,  it  seems,  is  con 
tented  with  merely  being,  and  whose  soul,  there 
fore,  is  an  exception  to  the  general  rule.  And 
what  have  the  "solar  walk"  (as  he  calls  it)  and 
"  milky  way  "  to  do  with  the  affair?  Does  our 
hope  of  heaven  depend  on  our  knowledge  of 
astronomy?  Or  does  he  mean  that  science  and 
faith  are  necessarily  hostile?  And,  after  being 
told  that  it  is  the  "  untutored  mind "  of  the 
savage  which  "  sees  God  in  clouds  and  hears 
him  in  the  wind,"  we  are  rather  surprised  to 
find  that  the  lesson  the  poet  intends  to  teach  is 
that 

"  All  are  but  parts  of  one  stupendous  whole, 
Whose  body  Nature  is,  and  God  the  soul, 
That,  changed  through  all,  and  yet  in  all  the  same, 
Great  in  the  earth,  as  in  the  ethereal  frame, 
Warms  in  the  sun,  refreshes  in  the  breeze, 
Glows  in  the  stars,  and  blossoms  in  the  trees." 

So  that  we  are  no  better  off  than  the  untutored 
Indian,  after  the  poet  has  tutored  us.  Dr.  War- 
burton  makes  a  rather  lame  attempt  to  ward  off 
the  charge  of  Spinozism  from  this  last  passage. 
He  would  have  found  it  harder  to  show  that 
the  acknowledgment  of  any  divine  revelation 


182  POPE 

would  not  overturn  the  greater  part  of  its  teach 
ings.  If  Pope  intended  by  his  poem  all  that  the 
bishop  takes  for  granted  in  his  commentary,  we 
must  deny  him  what  is  usually  claimed  as  his 
first  merit,  —  clearness.  If  he  did  not>  we  grant 
him  clearness  as  a  writer  at  the  expense  of  sin 
cerity  as  a  man.  Perhaps  a  more  charitable 
solution  of  the  difficulty  would  be,  that  Pope's 
precision  of  thought  was  no  match  for  the  fluency 
of  his  verse. 

Lord  Byron  goes  so  far  as  to  say,  in  speak 
ing  of  Pope,  that  he  who  executes  the  best,  no 
matter  what  his  department,  will  rank  the  high 
est.  I  think  there  are  enough  indications  in 
these  letters  of  Byron's,  however,  that  they 
were  written  rather  more  against  Wordsworth 
than  for  Pope.  The  rule  he  lays  down  would 
make  Voltaire  a  greater  poet,  in  some  respects, 
than  Shakespeare.  Byron  cites  Petrarch  as  an 
example;  yet  if  Petrarch  had  put  nothing  more 
into  his  sonnets  than  execution^  there  are  plenty 
of  Italian  sonneteers  who  would  be  his  match. 
But,  in  point  of  fact,  the  department  chooses 
the  man  and  not  the  man  the  department,  and 
it  has  a  great  deal  to  do  with  our  estimate  of 
him.  Is  the  department  of  Milton  no  higher 
than  that  of  Butler  ?  Byron  took  especial  care 
not  to  write  in  the  style  he  commended.  But  I 
think  Pope  has  received  quite  as  much  credit 
in  respect  even  of  execution  as  he  deserves. 


POPE  183 

Surely  execution  is  not  confined  to  versification 
alone.  What  can  be  worse  than  this  ? 

"At  length  Erasmus,  that  great,  injured  name 
(The  glory  of  the  priesthood  and  the  shame), 
Stemmed  the  wild  torrent  of  a  barbarous  age, 
And  drove  those  holy  vandals  off  the  stage. ' ' 

It  would  have  been  hard  for  Pope  to  have  found 
a  prettier  piece  of  confusion  in  any  of  the  small 
authors  he  laughed  at  than  this  image  of  a  great, 
injured  name  stemming  a  torrent  and  driving 
vandals  off  the  stage.  And  in  the  following 
verses  the  image  is  helplessly  confused  :  — 

"Kind  self-conceit  to  some  her  glass  applies, 
Which  no  one  looks  in  with  another's  eyes, 
But,  as  the  flatterer  or  dependant  paint, 
Beholds  himself  a  patriot,  chief,  or  saint." 

The  use  of  the  word  "  applies "  is  perfectly 
un-English;  and  it  seems  that  people  who  look 
in  this  remarkable  glass  see  their  pictures  and 
nqt  their  reflections.  Often,  also,  when  Pope 
attempts  the  sublime,  his  epithets  become  curi 
ously  unpoetical,  as  where  he  says,  in  the 
"  Dunciad,"  — 

"  As,  one  by  one,  at  dread  Medea's  strain, 
The  sickening  stars  fade  off  the  ethereal  plain" 

And  not  seldom  he  is  satisfied  with  the  music 
of  the  verse  without  much  regard  to  fitness  of 
imagery  ;  in  the  "  Essay  on  Man,"  for  ex 
ample  :  — 


i84  POPE 

"Passions,  like  elements,  though  born  to  fight, 
Yet,  mixed  and  softened,  in  his  work  unite; 
These  't  is  enough  to  temper  and  employ; 
But  what  composes  man  can  man  destroy  ? 
Suffice  that  Reason  keep  to  Nature's  road, 
Subject,  compound  them,  follow  her  and  God. 
Love,  Hope,  and  Joy,  fair  Pleasure's  smiling  train, 
Hate,  Fear,  and  Grief,  the  family  of  Pain, 
These,  mixed  with  Art,  and  to  due  bounds  confined  . 
Make  and  maintain  the  balance  of  the  mind." 

Here  Reason  is  represented  as  an  apothecary 
compounding  pills  of  "Pleasure's  smiling  train" 
and  the  "  family  of  Pain.'*  And  in  the  "  Moral 
Essays," 

««  Know  God  and  Nature  only  are  the  same; 
In  man  the  judgment  shoots  at  flying  game, 
A  bird  of  passage,  gone  as  soon  as  found, 
Now  in  the  moon,  perhaps,  now  under  ground." 

The  "judgment  shooting  at  flying  game  "  is 
an  odd  image  enough;  but  I  think  a  bird  of  pass 
age,  now  in  the  moon  and  now  under  ground, 
could  be  found  nowhere  —  out  of  Goldsmith's 
"  Natural  History,"  perhaps.  An  epigrammatic 
expression  will  also  tempt  him  into  saying 
something  without  basis  in  truth,  as  where  he 
ranks  together  "  Macedonia's  madman  and  the 
Swede,"  and  says  that  neither  of  them  "  looked 
forward  farther  than  his  nose,"  a  slang  phrase 
which  may  apply  well  enough  to  Charles  XII., 
but  certainly  not  to  the  pupil  of  Aristotle,  who 
showed  himself  capable  of  a  large  political  fore- 


POPE  185 

thought.  So,  too,  the  rhyme,  if  correct,  is  a  suf 
ficient  apology  for  want  of  propriety  in  phrase, 
as  where  he  makes  "  Socrates  bleed" 

But  it  is  in  his  "Moral  Essays"  and  parts  of 
his  "  Satires  "  that  Pope  deserves  the  praise 
which  he  himself  desired  :  — 

"  Happily  to  steer 

From  grave  to  gay,  from  lively  to  severe, 
Correct  with  spirit,  eloquent  with  ease, 
Intent  to  reason,  or  polite  to  please." 

Here  Pope  must  be  allowed  to  have  established 
a  style  of  his  own,  in  which  he  is  without  a 
rival.  One  can  open  upon  wit  and  epigram  at 
any  page. 

"  Behold,  if  Fortune  or  a  mistress  frowns, 
Some  plunge  in  business,  other  shave  their  crowns; 
To  ease  the  soul  of  one  oppressive  weight, 
This  quits  an  empire,  that  embroils  a  state; 
The  same  adust  complexion  has  impelled, 
Charles  to  the  convent,  Philip  to  the  field." 

Indeed,  I  think  one  gets  a  little  tired  of  the 
invariable  this  set  off  by  the  inevitable  that, 
and  wishes  antithesis  would  let  him  have  a  little 
quiet  now  and  then.  In  the  first  couplet,  too, 
the  conditional  "  frown  "  would  have  been  more 
elegant.  But  taken  as  detached  passages,  how 
admirably  the  different  characters  are  drawn,  so 
admirably  that  half  the  verses  have  become 
proverbial.  This  of  Addison  will  bear  reading 
again  :  — 


186  POPE 

"  Peace  to  all  such;  but  were  there  one  whose  fires 
True  genius  kindles  and  fair  fame  inspires; 
Blest  with  each  talent  and  each  art  to  please, 
And  born  to  write,  converse,  and  live  with  ease; 
Should  such  a  man,  too  fond  to  rule  alone, 
Bear  like  the  Turk  no  brother  near  the  throne, 
View  him  with  scornful  yet  with  jealous  eyes, 
And  hate  for  arts  that  caused  himself  to  rise, 
Damn  with  faint  praise,  assent  with  civil  leer, 
And,  without  sneering,  teach  the  rest  to  sneer; 
Willing  to  wound  and  yet  afraid  to  strike, 
Just  hint  a  fault  and  hesitate  dislike, 
Alike  reserved  to  blame  or  to  commend, 
A  timorous  foe  and  a  suspicious  friend; 
Dreading  e'en  fools,  by  flatterers  besieged, 
And  so  obliging  that  he  ne'er  obliged; 
Like  Cato  give  his  little  Senate  laws, 
And  sit  attentive  to  his  own  applause, 
While  wits  and  templars  every  sentence  raise, 
And  wonder  with  a  foolish  face  of  praise;  — 
Who  but  must  laugh  if  such  a  man  there  be  ? 
Who  wculd  not  weep  if  Atticus  were  he  ?  '* 

With  the  exception  of  the  somewhat  technical 
image  in  the  second  verse  of  Fame  blowing  the 
fire  of  genius,  which  too  much  puts  us  in  mind 
of  the  frontispieces  of  the  day,  surely  nothing 
better  of  its  kind  was  ever  written.  How  ap 
plicable  it  was  to  Addison  I  shall  consider  in 
another  place.  As  an  accurate  intellectual  ob 
server  and  dcscriber  of  personal  weaknesses, 
Pope  stands  by  himself  in  English  verse. 

In  his  epistle  on  the  characters  of  women,  no 
one  who  has  ever  known  a  noble  woman,  nay, 


POPE  187 

I  should  almost  say  no  one  who  ever  had  a 
mother  or  sister,  will  find  much  to  please  him. 
The  climax  of  his  praise  rather  degrades  than 
elevates. 

"  O,  blest  in  temper,  whose  unclouded  ray 
Can  make  to-morrow  cheerful  as  to-day, 
She  who  can  love  a  sister's  charms,  or  hear 
Sighs  for  a  daughter  with  unwounded  ear, 
She  who  ne'er  answers  till  a  husband  cools, 
Or,  if  she  rules  him,  never  shows  she  rules, 
Charms  by  accepting,  by  submitting  sways, 
Yet  has  her  humor  most  when  she  obeys; 
Lets  fops  or  fortune  fly  which  way  they  will, 
Disdains  all  loss  of  tickets  or  codille, 
Spleen,  vapors,  or  small-pox,  above  them  all 
And  mistress  of  herself,  though  china  fall." 

The  last  line  is  very  witty  and  pointed,  —  but 
consider  what  an  ideal  of  womanly  nobleness  he 
must  have  had,  who  praises  his  heroine  for  not 
being  jealous  of  her  daughter.  Addison,  in  com 
mending  Pope's  "  Essay  on  Criticism,"  says, 
speaking  of  us  "  who  live  in  the  latter  ages  of 
the  world  "  :  "  We  have  little  else  to  do  left  us 
but  to  represent  the  common  sense  of  mankind, 
in  more  strong,  more  beautiful,  or  more  un 
common  lights."  I  think  he  has  here  touched 
exactly  the  point  of  Pope's  merit,  and,  in  doing 
so,  tacitly  excludes  him  from  the  position  of 
poet,  in  the  highest  sense.  Take  two  of  Jeremy 
Taylor's  prose  sentences  about  the  Countess  of 
Carbery,the  lady  in  Milton's  "Comus":  "The 


i88  POPE 

religion  of  this  excellent  lady  was  of  another 
constitution:  it  took  root  downward  in  hu 
mility,  and  brought  forth  fruit  upward  in  the 
substantial  graces  of  a  Christian,  in  charity  and 
justice,  in  chastity  and  modesty,  in  fair  friend 
ships  and  sweetness  of  society.  .  .  .  And  though 
she  had  the  greatest  judgment,  and  the  greatest 
experience  of  things  and  persons  I  ever  yet 
knew  in  a  person  of  her  youth  and  sex  and  cir 
cumstances,  yet,  as  if  she  knew  nothing  of  it, 
she  had  the  meanest  opinion  of  herself,  and  like 
a  fair  taper,  when  she  shined  to  all  the  room, 
yet  round  about  her  station  she  had  cast  a  shadow 
and  a  cloud,  and  she  shined  to  everybody  but 
herself/'  'This  is  poetry,  though  not  in  verse. 
The  plays  of  the  elder  dramatists  are  not  with 
out  examples  of  weak  and  vile  women,  but  they 
are  not  without  noble  ones  either.  Take  these 
verses  of  Chapman,  for  example  :  — 

"  Let  no  man  value  at  a  little  price 

A  virtuous  woman's  counsel:  her  winged  spirit 
Is  feathered  oftentimes  with  noble  words 
And,  like  her  beauty,  ravishing  and  pure; 
The  weaker  body,  still  the  stronger  soul. 
O,  what  a  treasure  is  a  virtuous  wife, 
Discreet  and  loving.     Not  one  gift  on  earth 
Makes  a  manvs  life  so  nighly  bound  to  heaven. 
She  gives  him  double  forces  to  endure 
And  to  enjoy,  being  one  with  him, 
Feeling  his  joys  and  griefs  with  equal  sense: 
If  he  fetch  sighs,  she  draws  her  breath  as  short; 


POPE  189 

If  he  lament,  she  melts  herself  in  tears; 

If  he  be  glad,  she  triumphs;  if  he  stir, 

She  moves  his  way,  in  all  things  his  sweet  ape, 

Himself  divinely  varied  without  change. 

All  store  without  her  leaves  a  man  but  poor, 

And  with  her  poverty  is  exceeding  store." 

Pope  in  the  characters  I  have  read  was  drawing 
his  ideal  woman,  for  he  says  at  the  end  that  she 
shall  be  his  muse.  The  sentiments  are  those  of 
a  bourgeois  and  of  the  back  parlor,  more  than  of 
the  poet  and  the  muse's  bower.  A  man's  mind 
is  known  by  the  company  it  keeps. 

Now  it  is  very  possible  that  the  women  of 
Pope's  time  were  as  bad  as  they  could  be ;  but 
if  God  made  poets  for  anything,  it  was  to  keep 
alive  the  traditions  of  the  pure,  the  holy,  and 
the  beautiful.  I  grant  the  influence  of  the  age, 
but  there  is  a  sense  in  which  the  poet  is  of  no 
age,  and  Beauty,  driven  from  every  other  home, 
will  never  be  an  outcast  and  a  wanderer,  while 
there  is  a  poet's  nature  left,  will  never  fail  of  the 
tribute  at  least  of  a  song.  It  seems  to  me  that 
Pope  had  a  sense  of  the  neat  rather  than  of  the 
beautiful.  His  nature  delighted  more  in  detect 
ing  the  blemish  than  in  enjoying  the  charm. 

However  great  his  merit  in  expression,  I 
think  it  impossible  that  a  true  poet  could  have 
written  such  a  satire  as  the  "  Dunciad,"  which  is 
even  nastier  than  it  is  witty.  It  is  filthy  even  in 
a  filthy  age,  and  Swift  himself  could  not  have 


1 90  POPE 

gone  beyond  some  parts  of  it.  One's  mind  needs 
to  be  sprinkled  with  some  disinfecting  fluid  after 
reading  it.  I  do  not  remember  that  any  other 
poet  ever  made  poverty  a  crime.  And  it  is 
wholly  without  discrimination.  De  Foe  is  set 
in  the  pillory  forever;  and  George  Wither,  the 
author  of  that  charming  poem,  "  Fair  Virtue," 
classed  among  the  dunces.  And  was  it  not  in 
this  age  that  loose  Dick  Steele  paid  his  wife  the 
finest  compliment  ever  paid  to  woman,  when  he 
said  "that  to  love  her  was  a  liberal  education"? 
Even  in  the  "  Rape  of  the  Lock,"  the  fancy  is 
that  of  a  wit  rather  than  of  a  poet.  It  might 
not  be  just  to  compare  his  Sylphs  with  the  Fair 
ies  of  Shakespeare  ;  but  contrast  the  kind  of 
fancy  shown  in  the  poem  with  that  of  Drayton's 
"  Nymphidia,"  for  example.  I  will  give  one 
stanza  of  it,  describing  the  palace  of  the  Fairy: 

"The  walls  of  spiders'  legs  were  made, 
Well  mortised,  and  finely  laid 
(He  was  the  master  of  his  trade 
It  curiously  that  builded): 
The  windows  of  the  eyes  of  cats, 
And,  for  the  roof,  instead  of  slats 
'T  is  covered  with  the  skins  of  bats, 
With  moonshine  that  are  gilded." 

In  the  last  line  the  eye  and  fancy  of  a  poet  are 
recognized. 

Personally  we  know  more  about  Pope  than 
about  any  of  our  poets.    He  kept  no   secrets 


POPE  191 

about  himself.  If  he  did  not  let  the  cat  out  of  the 
bag,  he  always  contrived  to  give  her  tail  a  wrench 
so  that  we  might  know  she  was  there.  In  spite 
of  the  savageness  of  his  satires,  his  natural  dis 
position  seems  to  have  been  an  amiable  one, 
and  his  character  as  an  author  was  as  purely 
factitious  as  his  style.  Dr.  Johnson  appears  to 
have  suspected  his  sincerity  ;  but  artifice  more 
than  insincerity  lay  at  the  basis  of  his  character. 
I  think  that  there  was  very  little  real  malice  in 
him,  and  that  his  "  evil  was  wrought  from  want 
of  thought."  When  Dennis  was  old  and  poor, 
he  wrote  a  prologue  for  a  play  to  be  acted  for  his 
benefit.  Except  Addison,  he  numbered  among 
his  friends  the  most  illustrious  men  of  his  time. 
The  correspondence  of  Pope  is,  on  the  whole, 
less  interesting  than  that  of  any  other  eminent 
English  poet,  except  that  of  Southey,  and  their 
letters  have  the  same  fault  of  being  labored  com 
positions.  Southey's  are,  on  the  whole,  the  more 
agreeable  of  the  two,  for  they  inspire  one  (as 
Pope's  certainly  do  not)  with  a  sincere  respect 
for  the  character  of  the  writer.  Pope's  are  alto 
gether  too  full  of  the  proclamation  of  his  own 
virtues  to  be  pleasant  reading.  It  is  plain  that 
they  were  mostly  addressed  to  the  public,  per 
haps  even  to  posterity.  But  letters,  however 
carefully  drilled  to  be  circumspect,  are  sure  to 
blab,  and  those  of  Pope  leave  in  the  reader's 
mind  an  unpleasant  feeling  of  circumspection,— 


i92  POPE 

of  an  attempt  to  look  as  an  eminent  literary 
character  should  rather  than  as  the  man  really 
was.  They  have  the  unnatural  constraint  of  a 
man  in  full  dress  sitting  for  his  portrait  and  en 
deavoring  to  look  his  best.  We  never  catch 
him,  if  he  can  help  it,  at  unawares.  Among  all 
Pope's  correspondents,  Swift  shows  in  the  most 
dignified  and,  one  is  tempted  to  say,  the  most 
amiable  light.  It  is  creditable  to  the  Dean  that 
the  letters  which  Pope  addressed  to  him  are  by 
far  the  most  simple  and  straightforward  of  any 
that  he  wrote.  No  sham  could  encounter  those 
terrible  eyes  in  Dublin  without  wincing.  I  think, 
on  the  whole,  that  a  revision  of  judgment  would 
substitute  "  discomforting  consciousness  of  the 
public  "  for  "  insincerity  "  in  judging  Pope's 
character  by  his  letters.  He  could  not  shake 
off  the  habits  of  the  author,  and  never,  or  almost 
never,  in  prose,  acquired  that  knack  of  seeming 
carelessness  that  makes  Walpole's  elaborate  com 
positions  such  agreeable  reading.  Pope  would 
seem  to  have  kept  a  commonplace  book  of 
phrases  proper  to  this  or  that  occasion ;  and  he 
transfers  a  compliment,  a  fine  moral  sentiment, 
nay,  even  sometimes  a  burst  of  passionate  ardor, 
from  one  correspondent  to  another,  with  the 
most  cold-blooded  impartiality.  Were  it  not 
for  this  curious  economy  of  his,  no  one  could 
read  his  letters  to  Lady  Wortley  Montagu  with 
out  a  conviction  that  thev  were  written  bv  a  lover. 


POPE  193 

Indeed,  I  think  nothing  short  of  the  spretae 
injuria  formae  will  account  for  (though  it  will 
not  excuse)  the  savage  vindictiveness  he  felt  and 
showed  towards  her.  It  may  be  suspected  also 
that  the  bitterness  of  caste  added  gall  to  his 
resentment.  His  enemy  wore  that  impenetrable 
armor  of  superior  rank  which  rendered  her  in 
difference  to  his  shafts  the  more  provoking  that 
it  was  unaffected.  Even  for  us  his  satire  loses 
its  sting  when  we  reflect  that  it  is  not  in  human 
nature  for  a  woman  to  have  had  two  such  ut 
terly  irreconcilable  characters  as  those  of  Lady 
Mary  before  and  after  her  quarrel  with  the  poet. 
In  any  view  of  Pope's  conduct  in  this  affair, 
there  is  an  ill  savor  in  his  attempting  to  degrade 
a  woman  whom  he  had  once  made  sacred  with 
his  love.  Spenser  touches  the  right  chord  when 
he  says  of  the  Rosalinde  who  had  rejected  him, 

"  Not,  then,  to  her,  that  scorned  thing  so  base, 
But  to  myself  the  blame,  that  lookt  so  high; 
Yet  so  much  grace  let  her  vouchsafe  to  grant 
To  simple  swain,  sith  her  I  may  not  love, 
Yet  that  I  may  her  honor  paravant 
And  praise  her  worth,  though  far  my  wit  above; 
Such  grace  shall  be  some  guerdon  of  the  grief 
And  long  affliction  which  I  have  endured." 

4 

In  his  correspondence  with  Aaron  Hill,  Pope, 
pushed  to  the  wall,  appears  positively  mean. 
He  vainly  endeavors  to  show  that  his  person 
alities  had  all  been  written  in  the  interests  of 


i94  POPE 

literature  and  morality,  and  from  no  selfish  mo 
tive.  But  it  is  hard  to  believe  that  Theobald 
would  have  been  deemed  worthy  of  his  disgust 
ful  preeminence  but  for  the  manifest  superiority 
of  his  edition  of  Shakespeare,  or  that  Addison 
would  have  been  so  adroitly  disfigured  unless 
through  wounded  self-love.  It  is  easy  to  con 
ceive  the  resentful  shame  which  Pope  must  have 
felt  when  Addison  so  almost  contemptuously 
disavowed  all  complicity  in  his  volunteer  de 
fence  of  "  Cato  "  in  a  brutal  assault  on  Dennis. 
Pope  had  done  a  mean  thing  to  propitiate  a  man 
whose  critical  judgment  he  dreaded  ;  and  the 
great  man,  instead  of  thanking  him,  had  resented 
his  interference  as  impertinent.  In  the  whole 
portrait  of  Atticus  one  cannot  help  feeling  that 
Pope's  satire  is  not  founded  on  knowledge, 
but  rather  on  what  his  own  sensitive  suspicion 
divined  of  the  opinions  of  one  whose  expressed 
preferences  in  poetry  implied  a  condemnation 
of  the  very  grounds  of  the  satirist's  own  popu 
larity.  We  shall  not  so  easily  give  up  the  purest 
and  most  dignified  figure  of  that  somewhat  vul 
gar  generation,  who  ranks  with  Sidney  and  Spen 
ser  as  one  of  the  few  perfect  gentlemen  in  our 
literary  annals.  A  man  who  could  command  the 
unswerving  loyalty  of  honest  and  impulsive  Dick 
Steele  could  not  have  been  a  coward  or  a  back 
biter.  The  only  justification  alleged  by  Pope 
was  of  the  flimsiest  kind,  namely,  that  Addison 


POPE  195 

regretted  the  introduction  of  the  Sylphs  in  the 
second  edition  of  the  "  Rape  of  the  Lock,"  say 
ing  that  the  poem  was  merum  sal  before.  Let  any 
one  ask  himself  how  he  likes  an  author's  emen 
dations  of  any  poem  to  which  his  ear  had  adapted 
itself  in  its  former  shape,  and  he  will  hardly 
think  it  needful  to  charge  Addison  with  any  mean 
motive  for  his  conservatism  in  this  matter.  One 
or  two  of  Pope's  letters  are  so  good  as  to  make 
us  regret  that  he  did  not  oftener  don  the  dress 
ing-gown  and  slippers  in  his  correspondence. 
One  in  particular,  to  Lord  Burlington,  describ 
ing  a  journey  on  horseback  to  Oxford  with  Lin- 
tot  the  bookseller,  is  full  of  a  lightsome  humor 
worthy  of  Cowper,  almost  worthy  of  Gray. 

Joseph  Warton,  in  summing  up  at  the  end  of 
his  essay  on  the  genius  and  writings  of  Pope, 
says  that  the  largest  part  of  his  works  "  is  of 
the  didactic,  moral,  and  satiric;  and,  conse 
quently,  not  of  the  most  poetic  species  of  poetry  ; 
whence  it  is  manifest  that  rood  sense  and  judr- 

o  J         o 

ment  were  his  characteristical  excellences  rather 
than  fancy  and  invention."  It  is  plain  that  in 
any  strict  definition  there  can  be  only  one  kind 
of  poetry,  and  that  what  Warton  really  meant 
to  say  was  that  Pope  was  not  a  poet  at  all.  This, 
I  think,  is  shown  by  what  Johnson  says  in  his 
"  Life  of  Pope/'  though  he  does  not  name  War- 
ton.  The  dispute  on  this  point  went  on  with 
occasional  lulls  for  more  than  a  half  century  after 


196  POPE 

Warton's  death.  It  was  renewed  with  peculiar 
acrimony  when  the  Rev.  W.  L.  Bowles  diffused 
and  confused  Warton's  critical  opinions  in  his 
own  peculiarly  helpless  way  in  editing  a  new 
edition  of  Pope  in  1806.  Bowles  entirely  mis 
took  the  functions  of  an  editor,  and  maladroitly 
entangled  his  judgment  of  the  poetry  with  his 
estimate  of  the  author's  character.1  Thirteen 
years  later,  Campbell,  in  his  "  Specimens,"  con 
troverted  Mr.  Bowles's  estimate  of  Pope's  char 
acter  and  position,  both  as  man  and  poet.  Mr. 
Bowles  replied  in  a  letter  to  Campbell  on  what 
he  called  "the  invariable  principles  of  poetry." 
This  letter  was  in  turn  somewhat  sharply  criti 
cised  by  Gilchrist  in  the  "  Quarterly  Review." 
Mr.  Bowles  made  an  angry  and  unmannerly  re 
tort,  among  other  things  charging  Gilchrist  with 
the  crime  of  being  a  tradesman's  son,  whereupon 
the  affair  became  what  they  call  on  the  frontier 
a  free  fight,  in  which  Gilchrist,  Roscoe,  the  elder 
Disraeli,  and  Byron  took  part  with  equal  relish, 
though  with  various  fortune.  The  last  shot,  in 
what  had  grown  into  a  thirty  years'  war,  between 

1  Bowles's  Sonnets,  well-nigh  forgotten  now,  did  more  than 
his  controversial  writings  for  the  cause  he  advocated.  Their 
influence  upon  the  coming  generation  was  great  (greater  than 
we  can  well  account  for)  and  beneficial.  Coleridge  tells  us 
that  he  made  forty  copies  of  them  while  at  Christ's  Hospital. 
Wordsworth's  prefaces  first  made  imagination  the  true  test  of 
poetry,  in  its  more  modern  sense.  But  they  drew  little  notice 
till  later. 


POPE  197 

the  partisans  of  what  was  called  the  Old  School 
of  poetry  and  those  of  the  New,  was  fired  by 
Bowles  in  1826.  Bowles,  in  losing  his  temper, 
lost  also  what  little  logic  he  had,  and  though, 
in  a  vague  way,  aesthetically  right,  contrived 
always  to  be  argumentatively  wrong.  Anger 
made  worse  confusion  in  a  brain  never  very  clear, 
and  he  had  neither  the  scholarship  nor  the  crit 
ical  faculty  for  a  vigorous  exposition  of  his  own 
thesis.  Never  was  wilder  hitting  than  his,  and 
he  laid  himself  open  to  dreadful  punishment,  es 
pecially  from  Byron,  whose  two  letters  are  mas 
terpieces  of  polemic  prose.  Bowles  most  happily 
exemplified  in  his  own  pamphlets  what  was  really 
the  turning-point  of  the  whole  controversy 
(though  all  the  combatants  more  or  less  lost 
sight  of  it  or  never  saw  it),  namely,  that  without 
clearness  and  terseness  there  could  be  no  good 
writing,  whether  in  prose  or  verse;  in  other 
words  that,  while  precision  of  phrase  presup 
poses  lucidity  of  thought,  yet  good  writing  is  an 
art  as  well  as  a  gift.  Byron  alone  saw  clearly  that 
here  was  the  true  knot  of  the  question,  though, 
as  his  object  was  mainly  mischief,  he  was  not 
careful  to  loosen  it.  The  sincerity  of  Byron's 
admiration  of  Pope  has  been,  it  seems  to  me, 
too  hastily  doubted.  What  he  admired  in  him 
was  that  patience  in  careful  finish  which  he  felt 
to  be  wanting  in  himself  and  in  most  of  his  con 
temporaries.  Pope's  assailants  went  so  far  as  to 


198  POPE 

make  a  defect  of  what,  rightly  considered,  was 
a  distinguished  merit,  though  the  amount  of  it 
was  exaggerated.  The  weak  point  in  the  case 
was  that  his  nicety  concerned  itself  wholly  about 
the  phrase,  leaving  the  thought  to  be  as  faulty 
as  it  would,  and  that  it  seldom  extended  beyond 
the  couplet,  often  not  beyond  a  single  verse. 
His  serious  poetry,  therefore,  at  its  best,  is  a 
succession  of  loosely  strung  epigrams,  and  no 
poet  more  often  than  he  makes  the  second  line 
of  the  couplet  a  mere  train-bearer  to  the  first. 
His  more  ambitious  works  may  be  defined  as 
careless  thinking  carefully  versified.  Lessing 
was  one  of  the  first  to  see  this,  and  accordingly 
he  tells  us  that  "  his  great,  I  will  not  say  greatest, 
merit  lay  in  what  we  call  the  mechanic  of 
poetry."  1  Lessing,  with  his  usual  insight,  par 
enthetically  qualifies  his  statement;  for  where 
Pope,  as  in  the  "  Rape  of  the  Lock,"  found  a 
subject  exactly  level  with  his  genius,  he  was 
able  to  make  what,  taken  for  all  in  all,  is  the 
most  perfect  poem  in  the  language. 

It  will  hardly  be  questioned  that  the  man 
who  writes  what  is  still  piquant  and  remember- 
able,  a  century  and  a  quarter  after  his  death, 
was  a  man  of  genius.  But  there  are  two  modes 
of  uttering  such  things  as  cleave  to  the  memory 

1  Brief e  die  neueste  Litter a tur  betreffend,  1759,  ii.  Brief. 
See  also  his  more  elaborate  criticism  of  the  Essay  on  Man 
(Pope  ein  Metaphysiker} ,  1755. 


POPE  199 

of  mankind.  They  may  be  said  or  sung.  I  do 
not  think  that  Pope's  verse  anywhere  sings,  but 
it  should  seem  that  the  abiding  presence  of 
fancy  in  his  best  work  forbids  his  exclusion  from 
the  rank  of  poet.  The  atmosphere  in  which  he 
habitually  dwelt  was  an  essentially  prosaic  one, 
the  language  habitual  to  him  was  that  of  con 
versation  and  society,  so  that  he  lacked  the  help 
of  that  fresher  dialect  which  seems  like  inspira 
tion  in  the  elder  poets.  His  range  of  associa 
tions  was  of  that  narrow  kind  which  is  always 
vulgar,  whether  it  be  found  in  the  village  or  the 
court.  Certainly  he  has  not  the  force  and 
majesty  of  Dryden  in  his  better  moods,  but  he 
has  a  grace,  a  finesse,  an  art  of  being  pungent, 
a  sensitiveness  to  impressions,  that  would  incline 
us  to  rank  him  with  Voltaire  (whom  in  many 
ways  he  so  much  resembles),  as  an  author  with 
whom  the  gift  of  writing  was  primary,  and  that 
of  verse  secondary.  No  other  poet  that  I  re 
member  ever  wrote  prose  which  is  so  purely 
prose  as  his  ;  and  yet,  in  any  impartial  criticism, 
the  "  Rape  of  the  Lock  "  sets  him  even  as  a  poet 
far  above  many  men  more  largely  endowed  with 
poetic  feeling  and  insight  than  he. 

A  great  deal  must  be  allowed  to  Pope  for  the 
age  in  which  he  lived,  and  not  a  little,  I  think, 
for  the  influence  of  Swift.  In  his  own  province 
he  still  stands  unapproachably  alone.  If  to  be 
the  greatest  satirist  of  individual  men,  rather 


200  POPE 

than  of  human  nature,  if  to  be  the  highest  ex 
pression  which  the  life  of  the  court  and  the  ball 
room  has  ever  found  in  verse,  if  to  have  added 
more  phrases  to  our  language  than  any  other 
but  Shakespeare,  if  to  have  charmed  four  gen 
erations,  make  a  man  a  great  poet, —  then  he  is 
one.  He  was  the  chief  founder  of  an  artificial 
style  of  writing,  which  in  his  hands  was  living 
and  powerful,  because  he  used  it  to  express  arti 
ficial  modes  of  thinking  and  an  artificial  state 
of  society.  Measured  by  any  high  standard  of 
imagination,  he  will  be  found  wanting ;  tried  by 
any  test  of  wit,  he  is  unrivalled. 


WORDSWORTH 

1875 

A  GENERATION  has  now  passed  away 
since  Wordsworth  was  laid  with  the  family 
in  the  churchyard  at  Grasmere.1  Perhaps 
it  is  hardly  yet  time  to  take  a  perfectly  impar 
tial  measure  of  his  value  as  a  poet.  To  do  this 
is  especially  hard  for  those  who  are  old  enough 
to  remember  the  last  shot  which  the  foe  was 
sullenly  firing  in  that  long  war  of  critics  which 
began  when  he  published  his  manifesto  as  Pre 
tender,  and  which  came  to  a  pause  rather  than 
to  an  end  when  they  flung  up  their  caps  with 
the  rest  at  his  final  coronation.  Something  of  the 
intensity  of  the  odium  theologicum  (if  indeed 
the  aestheticum  be  not  in  these  days  the  more 
bitter  of  the  two)  entered  into  the  conflict.  The 
Wordsworthians  were  a  sect,  who,  if  they  had 
the  enthusiasm,  had  also  not  a  little  of  the 

1  "  I  pay  many  little  visits  to  the  family  in  the  churchyard 
at  Grasmere,"  writes  James  Dixon  (an  old  servant  of  Words 
worth)  to  Crabb  Robinson,  with  a  simple,  one  might  almost 
say  canine  pathos,  thirteen  years  after  his  wife's  death.  Words 
worth  was  always  considerate  and  kind  with  his  servants, 
Robinson  tells  us. 


202  WORDSWORTH 

exclusivcness  and  partiality  to  which  sects  are 
liable.  The  verses  of  the  master  had  for  them 
the  virtue  of  religious  canticles  stimulant  of 
zeal  and  not  amenable  to  the  ordinary  tests  of 
cold-blooded  criticism.  Like  the  hymns  of  the 
Huguenots  and  Covenanters, they  were  songs  of 
battle  no  less  than  of  worship,  and  the  combined 
ardors  of  conviction  and  conflict  lent  them  a  fire 
that  was  not  naturally  their  own.  As  we  read 
them  now,  that  virtue  of  the  moment  is  gone  out 
of  them,  and  whatever  of  Dr.  Wattsiness  there  is 
gives  us  a  slight  shock  of  disenchantment.  It 
is  something  like  the  difference  between  the 
"  Marseillaise  "  sung  by  armed  propagandists 
on  the  edge  of  battle,  or  by  Brissotins  in  the 
tumbrel,  and  the  words  of  it  read  coolly  in 
the  closet,  or  recited  with  the  factitious  frenzy 
of  Thercse.  It  was  natural  in  the  early  days  of 
Wordsworth's  career  to  dwell  most  fondly  on 
those  profounder  qualities  to  appreciate  which 
settled  in  some  sort  the  measure  of  a  man's  right 
to  judge  of  poetry  at  all.  But  now  we  must  admit 
the  shortcomings,  the  failures,  the  defects  as  no 
less  essential  elements  in  forming  a  sound  judg 
ment  as  to  whether  the  seer  and  artist  were  so 
united  in  him  as  to  justify  the  claim  first  put  in  by 
himself  and  afterwards  maintained  by  his  sect  to 
a  place  beside  the  few  great  poets  who  exalt  men's 
minds,  and  give  a  right  direction  and  safe  out 
let  to  their  passions  through  the  imagination, 


WORDSWORTH  203 

while  insensibly  helping  them  toward  balance 
of  character  and  serenity  of  judgment  by  stimu 
lating  their  sense  of  proportion,  form,  and  the 
nice  adjustment  of  means  to  ends.  In  none  of 
our  poets  has  the  constant  propulsion  of  an  un 
bending  will,  and  the  concentration  of  exclusive, 
if  I  must  not  say  somewhat  narrow,  sympathies 
done  so  much  to  make  the  original  endow 
ment  of  Nature  effective,  and  in  none  accord 
ingly  does  the  biography  throw  so  much  light 
on  the  works,  or  enter  so  largely  into  their  com 
position  as  an  element  whether  of  power  or  of 
weakness.  Wordsworth  never  saw,  and  I  think 
never  wished  to  see,  beyond  the  limits  of  his 
own  consciousness  and  experience.  He  early 
conceived  himself  to  be,  and  through  life  was 
confirmed  by  circumstances  in  the  faith  that  he 
was,  a  "  dedicated  spirit,"  *  a  state  of  mind  likely 
to  further  an  intense  but  at  the  same  time  one 
sided  development  of  the  intellectual  powers. 
The  solitude  in  which  the  greater  part  of  his 
mature  life  was  passed,  while  it  doubtless  min 
istered  to  the  passionate  intensity  of  his  musings 
upon  man  and  Nature,  was,  it  may  be  suspected, 

1  In  the  Prelude  he  attributes  this  consecration  to  a  sunrise 
seen  (during  a  college  vacation)  as  he  walked  homeward  from 
some  village  festival  where  he  had  danced  all  night  :  — 

"  My  heart  was  full  5  I  made  no  vows,  but  vows 
Were  then  made  for  me  j  bond  unknown  to  me 
Was  given  that  I  should  be,  else  sinning  greatly, 
A  dedicated  Spirit."  (Bk.  iv.) 


204  WORDSWORTH 

harmful  to  him  as  an  artist,  by  depriving  him 
of  any  standard  of  proportion  outside  himself 
by  which  to  test  the  comparative  value  of  his 
thoughts,  and  by  rendering  him  more  and  more 
incapable  of  that  urbanity  of  mind  which  could 
be  gained  only  by  commerce  with  men  more 
nearly  on  his  own  level,  and  which  gives  tone 
without  lessening  individuality.  Wordsworth 
never  quite  saw  the  distinction  between  the 
eccentric  and  the  original.  For  what  we  call 
originality  seems  not  so  much  anything  pecu 
liar,  much  less  anything  odd,  but  that  quality 
in  a  man  which  touches  human  nature  at  most 
points  of  its  circumference,  which  reinvigoratcs 
the  consciousness  of  our  own  powers  by  recall 
ing  and  confirming  our  own  unvalued  sensations 
and  perceptions,  gives  classic  shape  to  our  own 
amorphous  imaginings,  and  adequate  utterance 
to  our  own  stammering  conceptions  or  emotions. 
The  poet's  office  is  to  be  a  Voice,  not  of  one 
crying  in  the  wilderness  to  a  knot  of  already 
magnetized  acolytes,  but  singing  amid  the 
throng  of  men,  and  lifting  their  common  aspi 
rations  and  sympathies  (so  first  clearly  revealed 
to  themselves)  on  the  wings  of  his  song  to  a 
purer  ether  and  a  wider  reach  of  view.  We 
cannot,  if  we  would,  read  the  poetry  of  Words 
worth  as  mere  poetry ;  at  every  other  page  we 
find  ourselves  entangled  in  a  problem  of  aesthet 
ics.  The  world-old  question  of  matter  and  form, 


WORDSWORTH  205 

of  whether  nectar  is  of  precisely  the  same  flavor 
when  served  to  us  from  a  Grecian  chalice  or 
from  any  jug  of  ruder  pottery,  comes  up  for 
decision  anew.  The  Teutonic  nature  has  al 
ways  shown  a  sturdy  preference  of  the  solid 
bone  with  a  marrow  of  nutritious  moral  to  any 
shadow  of  the  same  on  the  flowing  mirror  of 
sense.  Wordsworth  never  lets  us  long  forget 
the  deeply  rooted  stock  from  which  he  sprang, 
—  vien  ben  da  lui. 


The  true  rank  of  Wordsworth  among  poets 
is,  perhaps,  not  even  yet  to  be  fairly  estimated, 
so  hard  is  it  to  escape  into  the  quiet  hall  of 
judgment  uninflamed  by  the  tumult  of  parti 
sanship  which  besets  the  doors. 

Coming  to  manhood,  predetermined  to  be  a 
great  poet,  at  a  time  when  the  artificial  school 
of  poetry  was  enthroned  with  all  the  authority 
of  long  succession  and  undisputed  legitimacy, 
it  was  almost  inevitable  that  Wordsworth,  who, 
both  by  nature  and  judgment,  was  a  rebel  against 
the  existing  order,  should  become  a  partisan. 
Unfortunately,  he  became  not  only  the  partisan 
of  a  system,  but  of  William  Wordsworth  as  its 
representative.  Right  in  general  principle,  he 
thus  necessarily  became  wrong  in  particulars. 


206  WORDSWORTH 

Justly  convinced  that  greatness  only  achieves 
its  ends  by  implicitly  obeying  its  own  instincts, 
he  perhaps  reduced  the  following  his  instincts 
too  much  to  a  system,  mistook  his  own  resent 
ments  for  the  promptings  of  his  natural  genius, 
and,  compelling  principle  to  the  measure  of  his 
own  temperament  or  even  of  the  controversial 
exigency  of  the  moment,  fell  sometimes  into  the 
error  of  making  naturalness  itself  artificial.  If 
a  poet  resolve  to  be  original,  it  will  end  com- 
lonly  in  his  being  merely  peculiar. 
Wordsworth  himself  departed  more  and  more 
in  practice,  as  he  grew  older,  from  the  theories 
which  he  had  laid  down  in  his  prefaces  ;  but 
those  theories  undoubtedly  had  a  great  effect  in 
retarding  the  growth  of  his  fame.  He  had  care 
fully  constructed  a  pair  of  spectacles  through 
which  his  earlier  poems  were  to  be  studied,  and 
the  public  insisted  on  looking  through  them  at 
his  mature  works,  and  were  consequently  unable 
to  see  fairly  what  required  a  different  focus.  He 
forced  his  readers  to  come  to  his  poetry  with  a 
certain  amount  of  conscious  preparation,  and 
thus  gave  them  beforehand  the  impression  of 
something  like  mechanical  artifice,  and  deprived 
them  of  the  contented  repose  of  implicit  faith. 
To  the  child  a  watch  seems  to  be  a  living  crea 
ture  ;  but  Wordsworth  would  not  let  his  read 
ers  be  children,  and  did  injustice  to  himself  by 
giving  them  an  uneasy  doubt  whether  creations 


WORDSWORTH  207 

which  really  throbbed  with  the  very  hearth- 
blood  of  genius,  and  were  alive  with  Nature's 
life  of  life,  were  not  contrivances  of  wheels  and 
springs.  A  naturalness  which  we  are  told  to  ex 
pect  has  lost  the  crowning  grace  of  Nature.  The 
men  who  walked  in  Cornelius  Agrippa's  vision 
ary  gardens  had  probably  no  more  pleasurable 
emotion  than  that  of  a  shallow  wonder,  or  an 
equally  shallow  self-satisfaction  in  thinking  they 
had  hit  upon  the  secret  of  the  thaumaturgy  ;  but 
to  a  tree  that  has  grown  as  God  willed  we  come 
without  a  theory  and  with  no  botanical  predilec 
tions,  enjoying  it  simply  and  thankfully;  or  the 
Imagination  re-creates  for  us  its  past  summers 
and  winters,  the  birds  that  have  nested  and  sung 
in  it,  the  sheep  that  have  clustered  in  its  shade, 
the  winds  that  have  visited  it,  the  cloudbergs 
that  have  drifted  over  it,  and  the  snows  that 
have  ermined  it  in  winter.  The  Imagination 
is  a  faculty  that  flouts  at  foreordination,.and 
Wordsworth  seemed  to  do  all  he  could  to  cheat 
his  readers  of  her  company  by  laying  out  paths 
with  a  peremptory  Do  not  step  off  the  gravel !  at 
the  opening  of  each,  and  preparing  pitfalls  for 
every  conceivable  emotion,  with  guide-boards  to 
tell  each  when  and  where  it  must  be  caught. 

But  if  these  things  stood  in  the  way  of  im 
mediate  appreciation,  he  had  another  theory 
which  interferes  more  seriously  with  the  total 
and  permanent  effect  of  his  poems.  He  was 


2o8  WORDSWORTH 

theoretically  determined  not  only  to  be  a  philo 
sophic  poet,  but  to  be  a  great  philosophic  poet, 
and  to  this  end  he  must  produce  an  epic.  Leav 
ing  aside  the  question  whether  the  epic  be 
obsolete  or  not,  it  may  be  doubted  whether 
the  history  of  a  single  man's  mind  is  universal 
enough  in  its  interest  to  furnish  all  the  require 
ments  of  the  epic  machinery,  and  it  may  be  more 
than  doubted  whether  a  poet's  philosophy  be 
ordinary  metaphysics,  divisible  into  chapter  and 
section.  It  is  rather  something  which  is  more 
energetic  in  a  word  than  in  a  whole  treatise,  and 
our  hearts  unclose  themselves  instinctively  at  its 
simple  Open  sesame  f  while  they  would  stand 
firm  against  the  reading  of  the  whole  body  of 
philosophy.  In  point  of  fact,  the  one  element 
of  greatness  which  "  The  Excursion  "  possesses 
indisputably  is  heaviness.  It  is  only  the  epi 
sodes  that  are  universally  read,  and  the  effect 
of  these  is  diluted  by  the  connecting  and  accom 
panying  lectures  on  metaphysics.  Wordsworth 
had  his  epic  mould  to  fill,  and,  like  Benvenuto 
Cellini  in  casting  his  Perseus,  was  forced  to 
throw  in  everything,  debasing  the  metal  Jest  it 
should  run  short.  Separated  from  the  rest,  the 
episodes  are  perfect  poems  in  their  kind,  and 
without  example  in  the  language. 

Wordsworth,  like  most  solitary  men  of  strong 
minds,  was  a  good  critic  of  the  substance  of 
poetry,  but  somewhat  niggardly  in  the  allow- 


WORDSWORTH  209 

ance  he  made  for  those  subsidiary  qualities 
which  make  it  the  charmer  of  leisure  and  the 
employment  of  minds  without  definite  object. 
Jt  may  be  doubted,  indeed,  whether  he  set  much 
store  by  any  contemporary  writing  but  his  own, 
and  whether  he  did  not  look  upon  poetry  too 
exclusively  as  an  exercise  rather  of  the  intellect 
than  as  a  nepenthe  of  the  imagination.1  He 
says  of  himself,  speaking  of  his  youth  :  — 

"  In  fine, 

I  was  a  better  judge  of  thoughts  than  words, 
Misled  in  estimating  words,  not  only 
By  common  inexperience  of  youth, 
But  by  the  trade  in  classic  niceties, 
The  dangerous  craft  of  culling  term  and  phrase 
*        From  languages  that  want  the  living  voice 
To  carry  meaning  to  the  natural  heart; 
To  tell  us  what  is  passion,  what  is  truth, 
What  reason,  what  simplicity  and  sense."  * 

Though  he  here  speaks  in  the  preterite  tense, 
this  was  always  true  of  him,  and  his  thought 
seems  often  to  lean  upon  a  word  too  weak  to 
bear  its  weight.  No  reader  of  adequate  insight 
can  help  regretting  that  he  did  not  earlier  give 
himself  to  "  the  trade  of  classic  niceties."  It  was 
precisely  this  which  gives  to  the  blank  verse  of 
Landor  the  severe  dignity  and  reserved  force 
which  alone  among  later  poets  recall  the  tune 

1  According  to  Landor,  he  pronounced  all  Scott's  poetry  to 
be  "not  worth  five  shillings." 
a  Prelude,  bk.  iv. 


zio  WORDSWORTH 

of  Milton,  and  to  which  Wordsworth  hever 
attained.  Indeed,  Wordsworth's  blank  verse 
(though  the  passion  be  profounder)  is  always 
essentially  that  of  Cowper.  They  were  alike 
also  in  their  love  of  outward  nature  and  of  simple 
things.  The  main  difference  between  them  is 
one  of  scenery  rather  than  of  sentiment,  between 
the  lifelong  familiar  of  the  mountains  and  the 
dweller  on  the  plain. 

It  cannot  be  denied  that  in  Wordsworth  the 
very  highest  powers  of  the  poetic  mind  were 
associated  with  a  certain  tendency  to  the  diffuse 
and  commonplace.  It  is  in  the  understanding 
(always  prosaic)  that  the  great  golden  veins  of 
his  imagination  are  embedded.1  He  wrote  too 
much  to  write  always  well ;  for  it  is  not  a  great 
Xerxes  army  of  words,  but  a  compact  Greek 
ten  thousand,  that  march  safely  down  to  poster 
ity.  He  set  tasks  to  his  divine  faculty,  which  is 
much  the  same  as  trying  to  make  Jove's  eagle 
do  the  service  of  a  clucking  hen.  Throughout 
"  ThejPrelude  "  and  "  The  Excursion  "  he  seems 

1  This  was  instinctively  felt,  even  by  his  admirers.  Miss 
Martineau  said  to  Crabb  Robinson  in  1839,  speaking  of 
Wordsworth's  conversation:  "  Sometimes  he  is  annoying  from 
the  pertinacity  with  wjiich  he  dwells  on  trifles;  at  other  times 
he  flows  on  in  the  utmost  grandeur,  leaving  a  strong  impression 
of  inspiration."  Robinson  tells  us  that  he  read  Resolution  and 
Independence  to  a  lady  who  was  affected  by  it  even  to  tears, 
and  then  said,  "  I  have  not  heard  anything  for  years  that  so 
much  delighted  me;  but,  after  all,  it  is  not  poetry.1* 


WORDSWORTH  211 

striving  to  bind  the  wizard  Imagination  with  the 
sand-ropes  of  dry  disquisition,  and  to  have  for 
gotten  the  potent  spell-word  which  would  make 
the  particles  cohere.  There  is  an  arenaceous 
quality  in  the  style  which  makes  progress  weari 
some.  Yet  with  what  splendors  as  of  mountain 
sunsets  are  we  rewarded  !  what  golden  rounds 
of  verse  do  we  not  see  stretching  heavenward 
with  angels  ascending  and  descending !  what 
haunting  harmonies  hover  around  us  deep  and 
eternal  like  the  undying  barytone  of  the  sea !  and 
if  we  are  compelled  to  fare  through  sands  and 
desert  wildernesses,  how  often  do  we  not  hear 
airy  shapes  that  syllable  our  names  with  a  start 
ling  personal  appeal  to  our  highest  consciousness 
and  our  noblest  aspiration,  such  as  we  wait  for 
in  vain  in  any  other  poet !  Landor,  in  a  letter 
to  Miss  Holford,  says  admirably  of  him,  "Com 
mon  minds  alone  can  be  ignorant  what  breadth 
of  philosophy,  what  energy  and  intensity  of 
thought,  what  insight  into  the  heart,  and  what 
observation  of  Nature  are  requisite  for  the  pro 
duction  of  such  poetry.'* 

Take  from  Wordsworth  all  which  an  honest 
criticism  cannot  but  allow,  and  what  is  left  will 
show  how  truly  great  he  was.  He  had  no  hu- 
mor,  no  dramatijc_pawer,  and  his  temperament 
was  of  that  dry  and  juiceless  quality,  that  in  all 
his  published  correspondence  you  shall  not  find 
a  letter,  but  only  essays.  If  we  consider  care- 


212  WORDSWORTH 

fully  where  he  was  most  successful,  we  shall  find 
that  it  was  not  so  much  in  description  of  natural 
scenery,  or  delineation  of  character,  as  in  vivid 
expression  of  the  effect  produced  by  external 
objects  and  events  uporTlTTS  nwrr  ifithd,  and  of 
the  shape  and  hue  (perhaps  momentary)  which 
they  in  turn  took  from  his  mood  or  tempera 
ment.  His  finest  passages  are  always  mono 
logues.  He  had  a  fondness  for  particulars,  and 
there  are  parts  of  his  poems  which  remind  us 
of  local  histories  in  the  undue  relative  impor 
tance  given  to  trivial  matters.  He  was  the 
historian  of  Wordsworthshire.  This  power  of 
particularization  (for  it  is  as  truly  a  power  as 
generalization)  is  what  gives  such  vigor  and 
greatness  to  single  lines  and  sentiments  of 
Wordsworth,  and  to  poems  developing  a  single 
thought  or  sentiment.  It  was  this  that  made 
him  so  fond  of  the  sonnet.  That  sequestered 
nook  forced  upon  him  the  limits  which  his 
fecundity  (if  I  may  not  say  his  garrulity)  was 
never  self-denying  enough  to  impose  on  itself. 
It  suits  his  solitary  and  meditative  temper,  and 
it  was  there  that  Lamb  (an  admirable  judge  of 
what  was  permanent  in  literature)  liked  him  best. 
Its  narrow  bounds,  but  fourteen  paces  from  end 
to  end,  turn  into  a  virtue  his  too  common  fault 
of  giving  undue  prominence  to  every  passing 
emotion.  He  excels  in  monologue,  and  the  law 
of  the  sonnet  tempers  monologue  with  mercy. 


WORDSWORTH  213 

In  "  The  Excursion  "  we  are  driven  to  the  sub 
terfuge  of  a  French  verdict  of  extenuating  cir 
cumstances.  His  mind  had  not  that  reach  and 
elemental  movement  of  Milton's,  which,  like  the 
trade-wind,  gathered  to  itself  thoughts  and  im 
ages  like  stately  fleets  from  every  quarter ;  some 
deep  with  silks  and  spicery,  some  brooding  over 
the  silent  thunders  of  their  battailous  armaments, 
but  all  swept  forward  in  their  destined  track, 
over  the  long  billows  of  his  verse,  every  inch  of 
canvas  strained  by  the  unifying  breath  of  their 
common  epic  impulse.  It  was  an  organ  that 
Milton  mastered,  mighty  in  compass,  capable 
equally  of  the  trumpet's  ardors  or  the  slim  deli 
cacy  of  the  flute,  and  sometimes  it  bursts  forth 
in  great  crashes  through  his  prose,  as  if  he 
touched  it  for  solace  in  the  intervals  of  his  toil. 
If  Wordsworth  sometimes  put  the  trumpet  to 
his  lips,  yet  he  lays  it  aside  soon  and  willingly 
for  his  appropriate  instrument,  the  pastoral  reed. 
And  it  is  not  one  that  grew  by  any  vulgar  stream, 
but  that  which  Apollo  breathed  through,  tend 
ing  the  flocks  of  Admetus,  —  that  which  Pan 
endowed  with  every  melody  of  the  visible  uni 
verse, —  the  same  in  which  the  soul  of  the  de 
spairing  nymph  took  refuge  and  gifted  with  her 
dual  nature,  —  so  that  ever  and  anon,  amid  the 
notes  of  human  joy  or  sorrow,  there  comes  sud 
denly  a  deeper  and  almost  awful  tone,  thrilling 
us  into  dim  consciousness  of  a  forgotten  divinity. 


2i4  WORDSWORTH 

Wordsworth's  absolute  want  of  humor,  while 
it  no  doubt  confirmed  his  self-confidence  by 
making  him  insensible  both  to  the  comical  in 
congruity  into  which  he  was  often  led  by  his 
earlier  theory  concerning  the  language  of  poetry 
and  to  the  not  unnatural  ridicule  called  forth  by 
it,  seems  to  have  been  indicative  of  a  certain 
dulness  of  perception  in  other  directions.1  We 

1  Nowhere  is  this  displayed  with  more  comic  self-compla 
cency  than  when  he  thought  it  needful  to  rewrite  the  ballad  of 
Helen  of  Kircannelj,  —  a  poem  hardly  to  be  matched  in  any 
language  for  swiftness  of  movement  and  savage  sincerity  of 
feeling.  Its  shuddering  compression  is  masterly. 

"  Curst  be  the  heart  that  thought  the  thought, 
And  curst  the  hand  that  fired  the  shot, 
When  in  my  arms  burd  Helen  dropt, 
That  died  to  succor  me  ! 

•*  O,  think  ye  not  my  heart  was  sair 

When  my  love  dropt  down  and  spake  na  mair  ?  ** 

Compare  this  with  — 

"  Proud  Gordon  cannot  bear  the  thoughts 
That  through  his  brain  are  travelling, 
And,  starting  up,  to  Bruce's  heart 
He  launched  a  deadly  javelinj 

Fair  Ellen  saw  it  when  it  came, 
And,  stepp'nir  forth  to  meet  the  same, 
Did  with  her  body  cover 
The  Youth,  her  chosen  lover. 

And  Bruce  (as  soon  as  ke  had  slain 
The  Gordon}  sailed  away  to  Spain, 
And  fought  with  rage  incessant 
Against  the  Moorish  Crescent.** 

These  are  surely  the  verses  of  an  attorney's  clerk  "  penning 
a  stanza  when  he  should  engross."  It  will  be  noticed  that 


WORDSWORTH  215 

cannot  help  feeling  that  the  material  of  his  na 
ture  was  essentially  prose,  which,  in  his  inspired, 
moments,  he  had  the  power  of  transmuting,  but 
which,  whenever  the  inspiration  failed  or  was 
factitious,  remained  obstinately  leaden.  The 
normal  condition  of  many  poets  would  seem  to 
approach  that  temperature  to  which  Words 
worth's  mind  could  be  raised  only  by  the  white 
heat  of  profoundly  inward  passion.  And  in 
proportion  to  the  intensity  needful  to  make  his 

Wordsworth  here  also  departs  from  his  earlier  theory  of  the 
language  of  poetry  by  substituting  a  javelin  for  a  bullet  as  less 
modern  and  familiar.  Had  he  written  — 

"  And  Gordon  never  gave  a  hint, 

But,  having  somewhat  picked  his  flint, 

Let  fly  the  fatal  bullet 

That  killed  that  lovely  pullet," — 

it  would  hardly  have  seemed  more  like  a  parody  than  the  rest. 
He  shows  the  same  insensibility  in  a  note  upon  the  Ancient 
Mariner  in  the  second  edition  of  the  Lyrical  Ballads:  "  The 
poem  of  my  friend  has  indeed  great  defects;  first,  that  the 
principal  person  has  no  distinct  character,  either  in  his  profes 
sion  of  mariner,  or  as  a  human  being  who,  having  been  long 
under  the  control  of  supernatural  impressions,  might  be  sup 
posed  himself  to  partake  of  something  supernatural;  secondly, 
that  he  does  not  act,  but  is  continually  acted  upon;  thirdly, 
that  the  events,  having  no  necessary  connection,  do  not  pro 
duce  each  other;  and  lastly,  that  the  imagery  is  somewhat 
Jaboriously  accumulated."  Here  is  an  indictment,  to  be  sure, 
and  drawn,  plainly  enough,  by  the  attorney's  clerk  afore 
named.  One  would  think  that  the  strange  charm  of  Coleridge's 
most  truly  original  poems  lay  in  this  very  emancipation  from 
the  laws  of  cause  and  effect. 


2i6  WORDSWORTH 

nature  thoroughly  aglow  is  the  very  high  quality 
of  his  best  verses.  They  seem  rather  the  pro 
ductions  of  Nature  than  of  man,  and  have  the 
lastingness  of  such,  delighting  our  age  with  the 
same  startle  of  newness  and  beauty  that  pleased 
our  youth.  Is  it  his  thought?  It  has  the  shift 
ing  inward  lustre  of  diamond.  Is  it  his  feeling  ? 
It  is  as  delicate  as  the  impressions  of  fossil  ferns. 
He  seems  to  have  caught  and  fixed  forever 
in  immutable  grace  the  most  evanescent  and 
intangible  of  our  intuitions,  the  very  ripple- 
marks  on  the  remotest  shores  of  being.  But  this 
intensity  of  mood  which  insures  high  quality  is 
by  its  very  nature  incapable  of  prolongation, 
and  Wordsworth,  in  endeavoring  it,  falls  more 
below  himself,  and  is,  more  even  than  many 
poets  his  inferiors  in  imaginative  quality,  a  poet 
of  passages.  Indeed,  one  cannot  help  having 
the  feeling  sometimes  that  the  poem  is  there 
for  the  sake  of  these  passages,  rather  than  that 
these  are  the  natural  jets  and  elations  of  a  mind 
energized  by  the  rapidity  of  its  own  motion. 
In  other  words,  the  happy  couplet  or  gracious 
image  seems  not  to  spring  from  the  inspiration 
of  the  poem  conceived  as  a  whole,  but  rather  to 
have  dropped  of  itself  into  the  mind  of  the  poet 
in  one  of  his  rambles,  who  then,  in  a  less  rapt 
mood,  has  patiently  built  up  around  it  a  setting 
of  verse  too  often  ungraceful  in  form  and  of  a 
material  whose  cheapness  may  cast  a  doubt  on 


WORDSWORTH  217 

the  priceless  quality  of  the  gem  it  encumbers.1 
During  the  most  happily  productive  period  of 
his  life,  Wordsworth  was  impatient  of  what  may 
be  called  the  mechanical  portion  of  his  art.  His 
wife  and  sister  seem  from  the  first  to  have  been 
his  scribes.  In  later  years,  he  had  learned  and 
often  insisted  on  the  truth  that  poetry  was  an 
art  no  less  than  a  gift,  and  corrected  his  poems 
in  cold  blood,  sometimes  to  their  detriment. 
But  he  certainly  had  more  of  the  vision  than  of 
the  faculty  divine,  and  was  always  a  little  numb 
on  the  side  of  form  and  proportion.  Perhaps 
his  best  poem  in  these  respects  is  the  "  Lao- 
damia,"  and  it  is  not  uninstructive  to  learn  from 
his  own  lips  that  "  it  cost  him  more  trouble 
than  almost  anything  of  equal  length  he  had 
ever  written.'*  His  longer  poems  (miscalled 
epical)  have  no  more  intimate  bond  of  union 
than  their  more  or  less  immediate  relation  to 
his  own  personality.  Of  character  other  than 
his  own  he  had  but  a  faint  conception,  and  all 
the  personages  of  "  The  Excursion  "  that  are 
not  Wordsworth  are  the  merest  shadows  of 
himself  upon  mist,  for  his  self-concentrated 

1   "A  hundred  times  when,  roving  high  and  low, 
I  have  been  harassed  with  the  toil  of  verse, 
Much  pains  and  little  progress,  and  at  once 
Some  lovely  Image  in  the  song  rose  up, 
Full-formed,  like  Venus  rising  from  the  sea." 

Prelude,  bk.  iv. 


218  WORDSWORTH 

nature  was  incapable  of  projecting  itself  into 
the  consciousness  of  other  men  and  seeing  the 
springs  of  action  at  their  source  in  the  recesses 
of  individual  character.  The  best  parts  of  these 
longer  poems  are  bursts  of  impassioned  solilo 
quy,  and  his  fingers  were  always  clumsy  at  the 
callida  junctura.  The  stream  of  narration  is 
sluggish,  if  varied  by  times  with  pleasing  reflec 
tions  (viridesque  placido  aequore  syhas)  ;  we  are 
forced  to  do  our  own  rowing,  and  only  when 
the  current  is  hemmed  in  by  some  narrow  gorge 
of  the  poet's  personal  consciousness  do  we  feel 
ourselves  snatched  along  on  the  smooth  but 
impetuous  rush  of  unmistakable  inspiration. 
The  fact  that  what  is  precious  in  Wordsworth's 
poetry  was  (more  truly  even  than  with  some 
greater  poets  than  he)  a  gift  ratherthan  an  achieve 
ment  should  always  be  borne  in  mind  in  taking 
the  measure  of  his  power.  I  know  not  whether 
to  call  it  height  or  depth,  this  peculiarity  of  his, 
but  it  certainly  endows  those  parts  of  his  work 
which  we  should  distinguish  as  Wordsworthian 
with  an  unexpectedness  and  impressiveness  of 
originality  such  as  we  feel  in  the  presence  of 
Nature  herself.  He  seems  to  have  been  half 
conscious  of  this,  and  recited  his  own  poems  to 
all  comers  with  an  enthusiasm  of  wondering 
admiration  that  would  have  been  profoundly 
comic  l  but  for  its  simple  sincerity  and  for  the 
1  Mr.  Emerson  tells  us  that  he  was  at  first  tempted  to  smile, 


WORDSWORTH  2,9 

fact  that  William  Wordsworth,  Esquire,  of 
Rydal  Mount,  was  one  person,  and  the  William 
Wordsworth  whom  he  so  heartily  reverenced 
quite  another.  We  recognize  two  voices  in  him, 
as  Stephano  did  in  Caliban.  There  are  Jeremiah 
and  his  scribe  Baruch.  If  the  prophet  cease  from 
dictating,  the  amanuensis,  rather  than  be  idle, 
employs  his  pen  in  jotting  down  some  anecdotes 
of  his  master,  how  he  one  day  went  out  and 
saw  an  old  woman,  and  the  next  day  did  not, 
and  so  came  home  and  dictated  some  verses  on 
this  ominous  phenomenon,  and  how  another 
day  he  saw  a  cow.  These  marginal  annotations 
have  been  carelessly  taken  up  into  the  text,  have 
been  religiously  held  by  the  pious  to  be  ortho 
dox  scripture,  and  by  dexterous  exegesis  have 
been  made  to  yield  deeply  oracular  meanings. 
Presently  the  real  prophet  takes  up  the  word 
again  and  speaks  as  one  divinely  inspired,  the 
Voice  of  a  higher  and  invisible  power.  Words 
worth's  better  utterances  have  the  bare  sincerity, 
the  absolute  abstraction  from  time  and  place,  the 
immunity  from  decay,  that  belong  to  the  grand 
simplicities  of  the  Bible.  They  seem  not  more 
his  own  than  ours  and  every  man's,  the  word 

and  Mr.  Ellis  Yarnall  (who  saw  him  in  his  eightieth  year) 
says,  "  These  quotations  [from  his  own  works]  he  read  in  a 
way  that  much  impressed  me;  it  seemed  almost  as  if  he  were 
awed  by  the  greatness  of  his  own  power ,  the  gifts  with  which 
he  had  been  endowed."  (The  italics  are  mine.) 


22o  WORDSWORTH 

of  the  inalterable  Mind.  This  gift  of  his  was 
naturally  very  much  a  matter  of  temperament, 
and  accordingly  by  far  the  greater  part  of  his 
finer  product  belongs  to  the  period  of  his  prime, 
c;e  Time  had  set  his  lumpish  foot  on  the  pedal 
that  deadens  the  nerves  of  animal  sensibility.1 
He  did  not  grow  as  those  poets  do  in  whom  the 
artistic  sense  is  predominant.  One  of  the  most 
delightful  fancies  of  the  Genevese  humorist, 
ToepfFer,  is  the  poet  Albert,  who,  having  had 
his  portrait  drawn  by  a  highly  idealizing  hand, 
does  his  best  afterwards  to  look  like  it.  Many 
of  Wordsworth's  later  poems  seem  like  rather 
unsuccessful  efforts  to  resemble  his  former  self. 
They  would  never,  as  Sir  John  Harrington  says 

1  His  best  poetry  was  written  when  he  was  under  the  im 
mediate  influence  of  Coleridge.  Coleridge  seems  to  have  felt 
this,  for  it  is  evidently  to  Wordsworth  that  he  alludes  when 
he  speaks  of  "  those  who  have  been  so  well  pleased  that  I 
should,  year  after  year,  flow  with  a  hundred  nameless  rills 
into  their  main  stream."  (Letters,  Conversations,  and  Re 
collections  of  S.  T.  C.,  vol.  i.  pp.  5,  6.)  "Wordsworth 
found  fault  with  the  repetition  of  the  concluding  sound  of  the 
participles  in  Shakespeare's  line  about  bees:  — 

"  '  The  singing  masons  building  roofs  of  golJ.* 

This,  he  said,  was  a  line  that  Milton  never  would  have  written. 
Keats  thought,  on  the  other  hand,  that  the  repetition  was  in  har 
mony  with  the  continued  note  of  the  singers. '  *  ( Leigh  Hunt' s 
Autobiography.)  Wordsworth  writes  to  Crabb  Robinson  in 
1837,  "  My  ear  is  susceptible  to  the  clashing  of  sounds  almost 
to  disease."  One  cannot  help  thinking  that  his  training  in 
these  niceries  was  begun  by  Coleridge. 


WORDSWORTH  221 

of  poetry,  "keep  a  child  from  play  and  an  old 
man  from  the  chimney-corner."  * 

Chief  Justice  Marshall  once  blandly  inter 
rupted  a  junior  counsel  who  was  arguing  certain 
obvious  points  of  law  at  needless  length,  by  say 
ing,  "  Brother  Jones,  there  are  some  things  which 
a  Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States  sitting  in 
equity  may  be  presumed  to  know,"  Wordsworth 
has  this  fault  of  enforcing  and  restating  obvious 
points  till  the  reader  feels  as  if  his  own  intelli 
gence  were  somewhat  underrated.  He  is  over- 
conscientious  in  giving  us  full  measure,  and  once 
profoundly  absorbed  in  the  sound  of  his  own 
voice,  he  knows  not  when  to  stop.  If  he  feel 
himself  flagging,  he  has  a  droll  way  of  keeping 
the  floor,  as  it  were,  by  asking  himself  a  series 
of  questions  sometimes  not  needing,  and  often 
incapable  of  answer.  There  are  three  stanzas  of 
such  near  the  close  of  the  First  Part  of  "  Peter 
Bell,"  where  Peter  first  catches  a  glimpse  of  the 
dead  body  in  the  water,  all  happily  incongruous, 
and  ending  with  one  which  reaches  the  height 
of  comicality :  — 

*«  Is  it  a  fiend  that  to  a  stake 
Of  fire  his  desperate  self  is  tethering  ? 
Or  stubborn  spirit  doomed  to  yell, 
In  solitary  ward  or  cell, 
Ten  thousand  miles  from  all  his  brethren  ?  " 

The  same  want  of  humor  which  made  him 

1  In  the  Preface  to  his  translation  of  the  Orlando  Furioso. 


2zz  WORDSWORTH 

insensible  to  incongruity  may  perhaps  account 
also  for  the  singular  unconsciousness  of  dispro 
portion  which  so  often  strikes  us  in  his  poetry. 
For  example,  a  little  farther  on  in  "  Peter  Bell  " 
we  find :  — 

"  Now —  like  a  tempest-shattered  bark 
That  overwhelmed  and  prostrate  lies, 
And  in  a  moment  to  the  verge 
Is  lifted  of  a  foaming  surge  — 
Full  suddenly  the  Ass  doth  rise!" 

And  one  cannot  help  thinking  that  the  similes 
of  the  huge  stone,  the  sea-beast,  and  the  cloud, 
noble  as  they  are  in  themselves,  are  somewhat 
too  lofty  for  the  service  to  which  they  are  put.1 
The  movement  of  Wordsworth's  mind  was 
too  slow  and  his  mood  too  meditative  for  nar 
rative  poetry.  He  values  his  own  thoughts  and 
reflections  too  much  to  sacrifice  the  least  of  them 
to  the  interests  of  his  story.  Moreover,  it  is 
never  action  that  interests  him,  but  the  subtle 
motives  that  lead  to  or  hinder  it.  "  The  Wag 
goner0  involuntarily  suggests  a  comparison  with 
"  Tarn  O'Shanter"  infinitely  to  its  own  disad 
vantage.  "  Peter  Bell,"  full  though  it  be  of  pro 
found  touches  and  subtle  analysis,  is  lumbering 
and  disjointed.  Even  Lamb  was  forced  to  con 
fess  that  he  did  not  like  it.  "  The  White  Doe," 
the  most  Wordsworthian  of  them  all  in  the  best 
meaning  of  the  epithet,  is  also  only  the  more 
1  In  Resolution  and  Independence. 


WORDSWORTH  223 

truly  so  for  being  diffuse  and  reluctant.  What 
charms  in  Wordsworth  and  will  charm  forever 
is  the 

«'  Happy  tone 

Of  meditation  slipping  in  between 
The  beauty  coming  and  the  beauty  gone." 

A  few  poets,  in  the  exquisite  adaptation  of  their 
words  to  the  tune  of  our  own  feelings  and  fan 
cies,  in  the  charm  of  their  manner,  indefinable 
as  the  sympathetic  grace  of  woman,  are  every 
thing  to  us  without  our  being  able  to  say  that 
they  are  much  in  themselves.  They  rather  nar 
cotize  than  fortify.  Wordsworth  must  subject 
our  mood  to  his  own  before  he  admits  us  to  his 
intimacy ;  but,  once  admitted,  it  is  for  life,  and 
we  find  ourselves  in  his  debt,  not  for  what  he 
has  been  to  us  in  our  hours  of  relaxation,  but 
for  what  he  has  done  for  us  as  a  reinforcement  of 
faltering  purpose  and  personal  independence 
of  character.  His  system  of  a  Nature-cure,  first 
professed  by  Dr.  Jean  Jacques  and  continued  by 
Cowper,  certainly  breaks  down  as  a  whole.  The 
Solitary  of  "  The  Excursion,"  who  has  not  been 
cured  of  his  scepticism  by  living  among  the 
medicinal  mountains,  is,  so  far  as  we  can  see, 
equally  proof  against  the  lectures  of  Pedler  and 
Parson.  Wordsworth  apparently  felt  that  this 
would  be  so,  and  accordingly  never  saw  his  way 
clear  to  finishing  the  poem.  But  the  treatment, 
whether  a  panacea  or  not,  is  certainly , whole- 


"4  WORDSWORTH 

some,  inasmuch  as  it  inculcates  abstinence,  ex 
ercise,  and  uncontaminate  air.  I  am  not  sure, 
indeed,  that  the  Nature-cure  theory  does  not 
tend  to  foster  in  constitutions  less  vigorous  than 
Wordsworth's  what  Milton  would  call  a  fugi 
tive  and  cloistered  virtue  at  a  dear  expense  of 
manlier  qualities.  The  ancients  and  our  own 
Elizabethans,  ere  spiritual  megrims  had  become 
fashionable,  perhaps  made  more  out  of  life  by- 
taking  a  frank  delight  in  its  action  and  passion 
and  by  grappling  with  the  facts  of  this  world, 
rather  than  muddling  themselves  over  the  in 
soluble  problems  of  another.  If  they  had  not 
discovered  the  picturesque,  as  we  understand  it, 
they  found  surprisingly  fine  scenery  in  man  and 
his  destiny,  and  would  have  seen  something 
ludicrous,  it  may  be  suspected,  in  the  spectacle 
of  a  grown  man  running  to  hide  his  head  in 
the  apron  of  the  Mighty  Mother  whenever  he 
had  an  ache  in  his  finger  or  got  a  bruise  in  the 
tussle  for  existence. 

But  when,  as  I  have  said,  our  impartiality  has 
made  all  those  qualifications  and  deductions 
against  which  even  the  greatest  poet  may  not 
plead  his  privilege,  what  is  left  to  Wordsworth 
is  enough  to  justify  his  fame.  Even  where  his 
genius  is  wrapped  in  clouds,  the  unconquerable 
lightning  of  imagination  struggles  through,  flash 
ing  out  unexpected  vistas,  and  illuminating  the 
humdrum  pathway  of  our  daily  thought  with  a 


WORDSWORTH  225 

radiance  of  momentary  consciousness  that  seems 
like  a  revelation.  If  it  be  the  most  delightful 
function  of  the  poet  to  set  our  lives  to  music, 
yet  perhaps  he  will  be  even  more  sure  of  our 
maturer  gratitude  if  he  do  his  part  also  as  mor 
alist  and  philosopher  to  purify  and  enlighten  ; 
if  he  define  and  encourage  our  vacillating  per 
ceptions  of  duty  ;  if  he  piece  together  our  frag 
mentary  apprehensions  of  our  own  life  and  that 
larger  life  whose  unconscious  instruments  we 
are,  making  of  the  jumbled  bits  of  our  dissected 
map  of  experience  a  coherent  chart.  In  the  great 
poets  there  is  an  exquisite  sensibility  both  of 
soul  and  sense  that  sympathizes  like  gossamer 
sea-moss  with  every  movement  of  the  element 
in  which  it  floats,  but  which  is  rooted  on  the 
solid  rock  of  our  common  sympathies.  Words 
worth  shows  less  of  this  finer  feminine  fibre  of 
organization  than  one  or  two  of  his  contempo 
raries,  notably  than  Coleridge  or  Shelley  ;  but 
he  was  a  masculine  thinker,  and  in  his  more 
characteristic  poems  there  is  always  a  kernel  of 
firm  conclusion  from  far-reaching  principles  that 
stimulates  thought  and  challenges  meditation. 
Groping  in  the  dark  passages  of  life,  we  come 
upon  some  axiom  of  his,  as  it  were  a  wall  that 
gives  us  our  bearings  and  enables  us  to  find 
an  outlet.  Compared  with  Goethe  we  feel  that 
he  lacks  that  serene  impartiality  of  mind  which 
results  from  breadth  of  culture ;  nay,  he  seems 


226  WORDSWORTH 

narrow,  insular,  almost  provincial.  He  reminds 
us  of  those  saints  of  Dante  who  gather  bright 
ness  by  revolvingon  their  own  axis.  But  through 
this  very  limitation  of  range  he  gains  perhaps 
in  intensity  and  the  impressiveness  which  re 
sults  from  eagerness  of  personal  conviction.  If 
we  read  Wordsworth  through,  as  I  have  just 
done,  we  find  ourselves  changing  our  mind  about 
him  at  every  other  page,  so  uneven  is  he.  If 
we  read  our  favorite  poems  or  passages  only,  he 
will  seem  uniformly  great.  And  even  as  regards 
"  The  Excursion  "  we  should  remember  how  few 
long  poems  will  bear  consecutive  reading.  For 
my  part  I  know  of  but  one,  —  the  "  Odyssey." 
None  of  our  great  poets  can  be  called  pop 
ular  in  any  exact  sense  of  the  word,  for  the 
highest  poetry  deals  with  thoughts  and  emotions 
which  inhabit,  like  rarest  sea-mosses,  the  doubt 
ful  limits  of  that  shore  between  our  abiding 
divine  and  our  fluctuating  human  nature,  rooted 
in  the  one,  but  living  in  the  other,  seldom  laid 
bare,  and  otherwise  visible  only  at  exceptional 
moments  of  entire  calm  and  clearness.  Of  no 
other  poet  except  Shakespeare  have  so  many 
phrases  become  household  words  as  of  Words 
worth.  If  Pope  has  made  current  more  epigrams 
of  worldly  wisdom,  to  Wordsworth  belongs  the 
nobler  praise  of  having  defined  for  us,  and  given 
us  for  a  daily  possession,  those  faint  and  vague 
suggestions  of  other-worldliness  of  whose  gentle 


WORDSWORTH  227 

ministry  with  our  baser  nature  the  hurry  and 
bustle  of  life  scarcely  ever  allowed  us  to  he 
conscious.  He  has  won  for  himself  a  secure 
immortality  by  a  depth  of  intuition  which  makes 
only  the  best  minds  at  their  best  hours  worthy, 
or  indeed  capable,  of  his  companionship,  and 
by  a  homely  sincerity  of-  human  sympathy 
which  reaches  the  humblest  heart.  Our  language 
owes  him  gratitude  for  the  habitual  purity  and 
abstinence  of  his  style,  and  we  who  speak  it, 
for  having  emboldened  us  to  take  delight  in 
simple  things,  and  to  trust  ourselves  to  our  own 
instincts.  And  he  hath  his  reward.  It  needs 
not  to  bid 

"  Renowned  Spenser,  lie  a  thought  more  nigh 
To  learned  Chaucer,  and  rare  Beaumond  lie 
A  little  nearer  Spenser  " ;  — 

for  there  is  no  fear  of  crowding  in  that  little 
society  with  whom  he  is  now  enrolled  as  fifth  in 
the  succession  of  the  great  English  Poets. 


CARLYLE1 

1866 

A  FEELING  of  comical  sadness  is  likely 
to  come  over  the  mind  of  any  middle- 
aged  man  who  sets  himself  to  recollect 
ing  the  names  of  different  authors  that  have 
been  famous,  and  the  number  of  contemporary 
immortalities  whose  end  he  has  seen  since  com 
ing  to  manhood.  Many  a  light,  hailed  by  too 
careless  observers  as  a  fixed  star,  has  proved  to 
be  only  a  short-lived  lantern  at  the  tail  cf  a 
newspaper  kite.  The  literary  heaven  which  our 
youth  saw  dotted  thick  with  rival  glories,  we 
find  now  to  have  been  a  stage-sky  merely,  arti 
ficially  enkindled  from  behind  ;  and  the  cynical 
daylight  which  is  sure  to  fellow  all  theatrical 
enthusiasms  shows  us  ragged  holes  where  once 
were  luminaries,  sheer  vacancy  instead  of  lustre. 
Our  earthly  reputations,  says  a  great  poet,  are 
the  color  of  grass,  and  the  same  sun  that  makes 
the  green  bleaches  it  out  again.  But  next  morn 
ing  is  not  the  time  to  criticise  the  scene-painter's 
firmament,  nor  is  it  quite  fair  to  examine  coldly 
a  part  of  some  general  illusion  in  the  absence 
1  Apropos  of  his  Frederick  the  Great. 


CARLYLE  229 

of  that  sympathetic  enthusiasm,  that  self-surren 
der  of  the  fancy,  which  made  it  what  it  was. 
It  would  not  be  safe  for  all  neglected  authors 
to  comfort  themselves  in  Wordsworth's  fashion, 
inferring  genius  in  an  inverse  proportion  to 
public  favor,  and  a  high  and  solitary  merit  from 
the  world's  indifference.  On  the  contrary,  it 
would  be  more  just  to  argue  from  popularity  a 
certain  amount  of  real  value,  though  it  may  not 
be  of  that  permanent  quality  which  insures  en 
during  fame.  The  contemporary  world  and 
Wordsworth  were  both  half  right.  He  undoubt 
edly  owned  and  worked  the  richest  vein  of  his 
period ;  but  he  offered  to  his  contemporaries 
a  heap  of  gold-bearing  quartz  where  the  baser 
mineral  made  the  greater  show,  and  the  pur 
chaser  must  do  his  own  crushing  and  smelting, 
with  no  guaranty  but  the  bare  word  of  the  miner. 
It  was  not  enough  that  certain  bolder  adven 
turers  should  now  and  then  show  a  nugget  in 
proof  of  the  success  of  their  venture.  The  gold 
of  the  poet  must  be  refined,  moulded,  stamped 
with  the  image  and  superscription  of  his  time, 
but  with  a  beauty  of  design  and  finish  that  are 
of  no  time.  The  work  must  surpass  the  mate 
rial.  Wordsworth  was  wholly  void  of  that  shap 
ing  imagination  which  is  the  highest  criterion 
of  a  poet. 

Immediate  popularity  and  lasting  fame,  then, 
would  seem  to  be  the  result  of  different  quali- 


230  CARLYLE 

ties,  and  not  of  mere  difference  in  degree.  It  is 
safe  to  prophesy  a  certain  durability  of  recog 
nition  for  any  author  who  gives  evidence  of 
intellectual  force,  in  whatever  kind,  above  the 
average  amount.  There  are  names  in  literary 
history  which  are  only  names;  and  the  works 
associated  with  them,  like  acts  of  Congress 
already  agreed  on  in  debate,  are  read  by  their 
titles  and  passed.  What  is  it  that  insures  what 
may  be  called  living  fame,  so  that  a  book  shall 
be  at  once  famous  and  read  ?  What  is  it  that 
relegates  divine  Cowley  to  that  remote,  uncivil 
Pontus  of  the  British  Poets,  and  keeps  gar 
rulous  Pepys  within  the  cheery  circle  of  the 
evening  lamp  and  fire?  Originality,  eloquence, 
sense,  imagination,  not  one  of  them  is  enough 
by  itself,  but  only  in  some  happy  mixture  and 
proportion.  Imagination  seems  to  possess  in 
itself  more  of  the  antiseptic  property  than  any 
other  single  quality  ;  but,  without  less  showy 
and  more  substantial  allies,  it  can  at  best  give 
only  deathlessness,  without  the  perpetual  youth 
that  makes  it  other  than  dreary.  It  were  easy 
to  find  examples  of  this  Tithonus  immortality, 
setting  its  victims  apart  from  both  gods  and 
men  ;  helpless  duration,  undying,  to  be  sure, 
but  sapless  and  voiceless  .also,  and  long  ago  de 
serted  by  the  fickle  Hemera.  And  yet  chance 
could  confer  that  gift  on  Glaucus,  which  love 
and  the  consent  of  Zeus  failed  to  secure  for  the 


CARLYLE  231 

darling  of  the  Dawn.  Is  it  mere  luck, then ? 
Luck  may,  and  often  does,  have  some  share  in 
ephemeral  successes,  as  in  a  gambler's  winnings 
spent  as  soon  as  got,  but  not  in  any  lasting  tri 
umph  over  time.  Solid  success  must  be  based 
on  solid  qualities  and  the  honest  culture  of  them. 
The  first  element  of  contemporary  popularity 
is  undoubtedly  the  power  of  entertaining.  If 
a  man  have  anything  to  tell,  the  world  cannot 
be  called  upon  to  listen  to  him  unless  he  have 
perfected  himself  in  the  best  way  of  telling  it. 
People  are  not  to  be  argued  into  a  pleasurable 
sensation,  nor  is  taste  to  be  compelled  by  any 
syllogism,  however  stringent.  An  author  may 
make  himself  very  popular,  however,  and  even 
justly  so,  by  appealing  to  the  passion  of  the 
moment,  without  having  anything  in  him  that 
shall  outlast  the  public  whim  which  he  satisfies. 
Churchill  is  a  remarkable  example  of  this.  He 
had  a  surprising  extemporary  vigor  of  mind; 
his  phrase  carries  great  weight  of  blow;  he 
undoubtedly  surpassed  all  contemporaries,  as 
Cowper  says  of  him,  in  a  certain  rude  and  earth- 
born  vigor;  but  his  verse  is  dust  and  ashes  now, 
solemnly  inurned,  of  course,  in  the  Chalmers 
columbarium,  and  without  danger  of  violation. 
His  brawn  and  muscle  are  fading  traditions, 
while  the  fragile,  shivering  genius  of  Cowper  is 
still  a  good  life  on  the  books  of  the  Critical 
Insurance  Office.  "  It  is  not,  then,  loftiness  of 


232  CARLYLE 

mind  that  puts  one  by  the  side  of  Virgil?*'  cries 
poor  old  Cavalcanti  at  his  wits'  end.  Certainly 
not  altogether  that.  There  must  be  also  the 
great  Mantuan's  art;  his  power,  not  only  of 
being  strong  in  parts,  but  of  making  those  parts 
coherent  in  an  harmonious  whole,  and  tributary 
to  it.  Gray,  if  we  may  believe  the  commenta 
tors,  has  not  an  idea,  scarcely  an  epithet,  that  he 
can  call  his  own;  and  yet  he  is,  in  the  best  sense, 
one  of  the  classics  of  English  literature.  He  had 
exquisite  felicity  of  choice ;  his  dictionary  had 
no  vulgar  word  in  it,  no  harsh  one,  but  all 
culled  from  the  luckiest  moods  of  poets,  and 
with  a  faint  but  delicious  aroma  of  association  ; 
he  had  a  perfect  sense  of  sound,  and  one  idea 
without  which  all  the  poetic  outfit  (si  absit pru- 
dentia]  is  of  little  avail,  —  that  of  combination 
and  arrangement,  in  short,  of  art.  The  poets 
from  whom  he  helped  himself  have  no  more 
claim  to  any  of  his  poems  as  wholes  than  the 
various  beauties  of  Greece  (if  the  old  story  were 
true)  to  the  Venus  of  the  artist. 

Imagination,  as  we  have  said,  has  more  vir 
tue  to  keep  a  book  alive  than  any  other  single 
faculty.  Burke  is  rescued  from  the  usual  doom 
of  orators,  because  his  learning,  his  experience, 
his  sagacity  are  rimmed  with  a  halo  by  this  be 
witching  light  behind  the  intellectual  eye  from 
the  highest  heaven  of  the  brain.  Shakespeare 
has  impregnated  his  common  sense  with  the 


CARLYLE  233 

steady  glowofit,  and  answers  the  mood  of  youth 
and  age,  of  high  and  low,  immortal  as  that  date 
less  substance  of  the  soul  he  wrought  in.  To 
have  any  chance  of  lasting,  a  book  must  satisfy, 
not  merely  some  fleeting  fancy  of  the  day,  but 
a  constant  longing  and  hunger  of  human  nature  ; 
and  it  needs  only  a  superficial  study  of  literature 
to  be  convinced  that  real  fame  depends  rather 
on  the  sum  of  an  author's  powers  than  on  any 
brilliancy  of  special  parts.  There  must  be  wis 
dom  as  well  as  wit,  sense  no  less  than  imagina 
tion,  judgment  in  equal  measure  with  fancy,  and 
the  fiery  rocket  must  be  bound  fast  to  the  poor 
wooden  stick  that  gives  it  guidance  if  it  would 
mount  and  draw  all  eyes.  There  are  some  who 
think  that  the  brooding  patience  which  a  great 
work  calls  for  belonged  exclusively  to  an  earlier 
period  than  ours.  Others  lay  the  blame  on  our 
fashion  of  periodical  publication,  which  necessi 
tates  a  sensation  and  a  crisis  in  every  number, 
and  forces  the  writer  to  strive  for  startling  effects, 
instead  of  that  general  lowness  of  tone  which  is 
the  last  achievement  of  the  artist.  The  simplic 
ity  of  antique  passion,  the  homeliness  of  antique 
pathos,  seems  not  merely  to  be  gone  out  of  fash 
ion,  but  out  of  being  as  well.  Modern  poets 
appear  rather  to  tease  their  words  into  a  fury 
than  to  infuse  them  with  the  deliberate  heats  of 
their  matured  conception,  and  strive  to  replace 
the  rapture  of  the  mind  with  a  fervid  intensity 


234  CARLYLE 

of  phrase.  Our  reaction  from  the  decorous 
platitudes  of  the  last  century  has  no  doubt  led 
us  to  excuse  this,  and  to  be  thankful  for  some 
thing  like  real  fire,  though  of  stubble  ;  but  our 
prevailing  style  of  criticism,  which  regards  parts 
rather  than  wholes,  which  dwells  on  the  beauty 
of  passages,  and,  above  all,  must  have  its  languid 
nerves  pricked  with  the  expected  sensation  at 
whatever  cost,  has  done  all  it  could  to  confirm 
us  in  our  evil  way.  Passages  are  good  when  they 
lead  to  something,  when  they  are  necessary  parts 
of  the  building,  but  they  are  not  good  to  dwell 
in.  This  taste  for  the  startling  reminds  us  of 
something  which  happened  once  at  the  burn 
ing  of  a  country  meeting-house.  The  building 
stood  on  a  hill,  and,  apart  from  any  other  con 
siderations,  the  fire  was  as  picturesque  as  could 
be  desired.  When  all  was  a  black  heap,  licking 
itself  here  and  there  with  tongueslof  fire,  there 
rushed  up  a  farmer  gasping  anxiously,  "  Hez 
the  bell  fell  yit  ?  "  An  ordinary  fire  was  no  more 
to  him  than  that  on  his  hearthstone  ;  even  the 
burning  of  a  meeting-house,  in  itself  a  vulcanic 
rarity,  could  not  (so  long  as  he  was  of  another 
parish)  tickle  his  outworn  palate;  but  he  had 
hoped  for  a  certain  tang  in  the  downcome  of  the 
bell  that  might  recall  the  boyish  flavor  of  con 
flagration.  There  was  something  dramatic,  no 
doubt,  in  this  surprise  of  the  brazen  sentinel  at 
his  post,  but  the  breathless  rustic  has  always 


CARLYLE  235 

seemed  to  me  a  type  of  the  prevailing  delusion 
in  aesthetics.  Alas  !  if  the  bell  must  fall  in  every 
stanza  or  every  monthly  number,  how  shall  an 
author  contrive  to  stir  us  at  last,  unless  with 
whole  Moscows,  crowned  with  the  tintinnabu- 
lary  crash  of  the  Kremlin  ?  For  myself  I  am 
glad  to  feel  that  I  am  still  able  to  find  content 
ment  in  the  more  conversational  and  domestic 
tone  of  my  old-fashioned  wood-fire.  No  doubt 
a  great  part  of  our  pleasure  in  reading  is  unex 
pectedness,  whether  in  turn  of  thought  or  of 
phrase  ;  but  an  emphasis  out  of  place,  an  inten 
sity  of  expression  not  founded  on  sincerity  of 
moral  or  intellectual  conviction,  reminds  one 
of  the  underscorings  in  young  ladies'  letters,  a 
wonder  even  to  themselves  under  the  colder 
north  light  of  matronage.  It  is  the  part  of  the 
critic,  however,  to  keep  cool  under  whatever 
circumstances,  and  to  reckon  that  the  excesses 
of  an  author  will  be  at  first  more  attractive  to 
the  many  than  that  average  power  which  shall 
win  him  attention  with  a  new  generation  of 
men.  It  is  seldom  found  out  by  the  majority, 
till  after  a  considerable  interval,  that  he  was  the 
original  man  who  contrived  to  be  simply  nat 
ural, —  the  hardest  lesson  in  the  school  of  art 
and  the  latest  learned,  if,  indeed,  it  be  a  thing 
capable  of  acquisition  at  all.  The  most  winsome 
and  wayward  of  brooks  draws  now  and  then 
some  lover's  foot  to  its  intimate  reserve,  while 


236  CARLYLE 

the  spirt  of  a  bursting  water-pipe  gathers  a 
gaping  crowd  forthwith. 

Mr.  Carlyle  is  an  author  who  has  now  been 
so  long  before  the  world  that  we  may  feel  to 
ward  him  something  of  the  unprejudice  of  pos 
terity.  It  has  long  been  evident  that  he  had  no 
more  ideas  to  bestow  upon  us,  and  that  no  new 
turn  of  his  kaleidoscope  would  give  us  anything 
but  some  variation  of  arrangement  in  the  bril 
liant  colors  of  his  style.  It  is  perhaps  possible, 
then,  to  arrive  at  some  not  wholly  inadequate 
estimate  of  his  place  as  a  writer,  and  especially 
of  the  value  of  the  ideas  whose  advocate  he 
makes  himself,  with  a  bitterness  and  violence 
that  increase,  as  it  seems  to  me,  in  proportion  as 
his  inward  conviction  of  their  truth  diminishes. 

The  leading  characteristics  of  an  author  who 
is  in  any  sense  original,  that  is  to  say,  who  does 
not  merely  reproduce,  but  modifies  the  influence 
of  tradition,  culture,  and  contemporary  thought 
upon  himself  by  some  admixture  of  his  own, 
may  commonly  be  traced  more  or  less  clearly 
in  his  earliest  works.  This  is  more  strictly  true, 
no  doubt,  of  poets,  because  the  imagination  is 
a  fixed  quantity,  not  to  be  increased  by  any 
amount  of  study  and  reflection.  Skill,  wisdom, 
and  even  wit  are  cumulative;  but  that  diviner 
faculty,  which  is  the  spiritual  eye,  though  it 
may  be  trained  and  sharpened,  cannot  be  added 
to  by  taking  thought.  This  has  always  been 


CARLYLE  237 

something  innate,  unaccountable,  to  be  laid  to  a 
happy  conjunction  of  the  stars.  Goethe,  the  last 
of  the  great  poets,  accordingly  takes  pains  to 
tell  us  under  what  planets  he  was  born  ;  and  in 
him  it  is  curious  how  uniform  the  imaginative 
quality  is  from  the  beginning  to  the  end  of  his 
long  literary  activity.  His  early  poems  show 
maturity,  his  mature  ones  a  youthful  freshness. 
The  apple  already  lies  potentially  in  the  blos 
som,  as  that  may  be  traced  also  by  cutting  across 
the  ripened  fruit.  With  a  mere  change  of  em 
phasis,  Goethe  might  be  called  an  old  boy  at 
both  ends  of  his  career. 

In  the  earliest  authorship  of  Mr.  Carlyle  we 
find  some  not  obscure  hints  of  the  future  man. 
Nearly  fifty  years  ago  he  contributed  a  few 
literary  and  critical  articles  to  the  Edinburgh 
Encyclopaedia.  The  outward  fashion  of  them  is 
that  of  the  period ;  but  they  are  distinguished 
by  a  certain  security  of  judgment  remarkable  at 
any  time,  remarkable  especially  in  one  so  young. 
British  criticism  has  been  always  more  or  less 
parochial ;  has  never,  indeed,  quite  freed  itself 
from  sectarian  cant  and  planted  itself  honestly 
on  the  aesthetic  point  of  view.  It  cannot  quite 
persuade  itself  that  truth  is  of  immortal  essence, 
totally  independent  of  all  assistance  from  quar 
terly  journals  or  the  British  army  and  navy. 
Carlyle,  in  these  first  essays,  already  shows  the 
influence  of  his  master,  Goethe,  the  most  widely 


238  CARLYLE 

receptive  of  critics.  In  a  compact  notice  of  Mon 
taigne,  there  is  not  a  word  as  to  his  religious  scep 
ticism.  The  character  is  looked  at  purely  from 
its  human  and  literary  sides.  As  illustrating  the 
bent  of  the  author's  mind,  the  following  passage 
is  most  to  our  purpose  :  "  A  modern  reader  will 
not  easily  cavil  at  the  patient  and  good-natured, 
though  exuberant  egotism  which  brings  back  to 
our  view  e  the  form  and  pressure  '  of  a  time  long 
past.  The  habits  and  humors,  the  mode  of  acting 
and  thinking^  'which  characterized  a  Gas  con  gen  tie- 
man  in  the  sixteenth  century ',  cannot  fail  to  amuse 
an  inquirer  of  the  nineteenth ;  while  the  faithful 
delineation  of  human  feeling:,  in  all  their  strength 
and  weakness )  will  serve  as  a  mirror  to  every  mind 
capable  of  self -examination"  We  find  here  no 
uncertain  indication  of  that  eye  for  the  moral 
picturesque,  and  that  sympathetic  appreciation 
of  character,  which  within  the  next  few  years  were 
to  make  Carlyle  the  first  in  insight  of  English 
critics  and  the  most  vivid  of  English  historians. 
In  all  his  earlier  writing  he  never  loses  sight  of 
his  master's  great  rule,  Den  Gegenstand  fest  zu 
halt  en.  He  accordingly  gave  to  Englishmen  the 
first  humanly  possible  likeness  of  Voltaire,  Dide 
rot,  Mirabeau,  and  others,  who  had  hitherto 
been  measured  by  the  usual  British  standard  of 
their  respect  for  the  geognosy  of  Moses  and  the 
historic  credibility  of  the  Books  of  Chronicles. 
What  was  the  real  meaning  of  this  phenomenon  ? 


CARLYLE  239 

what  the  amount  of  this  man's  honest  perform 
ance  in  the  world  ?  and  in  what  does  he  show 
that  family  likeness,  common  to  all  the  sons  of 
Adam,  which  gives  us  a  fair  hope  of  being  able 
to  comprehend  him  ?  These  were  the  questions 
which  Carlyle  seems  to  have  set  himself  honestly 
to  answer  in  the  critical  writings  which  fill  the 
first  period  of  his  life  as  a  man  of  letters.  In  this 
mood  he  rescued  poor  Boswell  from  the  unmer 
ited  obloquy  of  an  ungrateful  generation,  and 
taught  us  to  see  something  half-comically  beau 
tiful  in  the  poor,  weak  creature,  with  his  pathetic 
instinct  of  reverence  for  what  was  nobler,  wiser, 
and  stronger  than  himself.  Everything  that  Mr. 
Carlyle  wrote  during  this  first  period  thrills  with 
the  purest  appreciation  of  whatever  is  brave  and 
beautiful  in  human  nature,  with  the  most  vehe 
ment  scorn  of  cowardly  compromise  with  things 
base  ;  and  yet,  immitigable  as  his  demand  for  the 
highest  in  us  seems  to  be,  there  is  always  some 
thing  reassuring  in  the  humorous  sympathy 
with  mortal  frailty  which  softens  condemnation 
and  consoles  for  shortcoming.  The  remarkable 
feature  of  Mr.  Carlyle's  criticism  (see,  for  ex 
ample,  his  analysis  and  exposition  of  Goethe's 
"  Helena ")  is  the  sleuth-hound  instinct  with 
which  he  presses  on  to  the  matter  of  his  theme, 
—  never  turned  aside  by  a  false  scent,  regard 
less  of  the  outward  beauty  of  form,  sometimes 
almost  contemptuous  of  it,  in  his  hunger  after 


24°  CARLYLE 

the  intellectual  nourishment  which  it  may  hide. 
The  delicate  skeleton  of  admirably  articulated 
and  related  parts  which  underlies  and  sustains 
every  true  work  of  art,  and  keeps  it  from  sinking 
on  itself  a  shapeless  heap,  he  would  crush  re 
morselessly  to  come  at  the  marrow  of  meaning. 
With  him  the  ideal  sense  is  secondary  to  the 
ethical  and  metaphysical,  and  he  has  but  a  faint 
conception  of  their  possible  unity. 

By  degrees  the  humorous  element  in  his  na 
ture  gains  ground,  till  it  overmasters  all  the  rest. 
Becoming  always  more  boisterous  and  obtrusive, 
it  ends  at  last,  as  such  humor  must,  in  cynicism. 
In  "  Sartor  Resartus  "  it  is  still  kindly,  still  in 
fused  with  sentiment ;  and  the  book,  with  its 
mixture  of  indignation  and  farce,  strikes  one  as 
might  the  prophecies  of  Jeremiah,  if  the  mar 
ginal  comments  of  the  Rev.  Mr.  Sterne  in  his 
wildest  mood  had  by  some  accident  been  incor 
porated  with  the  text.  In  "  Sartor  "  the  marked 
influence  of  Jean  Paul  is  undeniable,  both  in 
matter  and  manner.  It  is  curious  for  one  who 
studies  the  action  and  reaction  of  national  litera 
tures  on  each  other,  to  see  the  humor  of  Swift 
and  Sterne  and  Fielding,  after  filtering  through 
Richter,  reappear  in  Carlyle  with  a  tinge  of  Ger 
manism  that  makes  it  novel,  alien,  or  even  dis 
pleasing,  as  the  case  may  be,  to  the  English 
mind.  Unhappily  the  bit  of  mother  from  Swift's 
vinegar-barrel  has  had  strength  enough  to  sour 


CARLYLE  241 

all  the  rest.  The  whimsicality  of  "  Tristram 
Shandy,"  which,  even  in  the  original,  has  too 
often  the  effect  of  forethought,  becomes  a  de 
liberate  artifice  in  Richter,  and  at  last  a  mere 
mannerism  in  Carlyle. 

Mr.  Carlyle  in  his  critical  essays  had  the 
advantage  of  a  well-defined  theme,  and  of  limits 
both  in  the  subject  and  in  the  space  allowed  for 
its  treatment,  which  kept  his  natural  extrava 
gance  within  bounds,  and  compelled  some  sort 
of  discretion  and  compactness.  The  great  merit 
of  these  essays  lay  in  a  criticism  based  on  wide 
and  various  study,  which,  careless  of  tradition, 
applied  its  standard  to  the  real  and  not  the  con 
temporary  worth  of  the  literary  or  other  perform 
ance  to  be  judged,  and  in  an  unerring  eye  for 
that  fleeting  expression  of  the  moral  features  of 
character,  a  perception  of  which  alone  makes  the 
drawing  of  a  coherent  likeness  possible.  Their 
defect  was  a  tendency,  gaining  strength  with 
years,  to  confound  the  moral  with  the  aesthetic 
standard,  and  to  make  the  value  of  an  author's 
work  dependent  on  the  general  force  of  his  na 
ture  rather  than  on  its  special  fitness  for  a  given 
task.  In  proportion  as  his  humor  gradually 
overbalanced  the  other  qualities  of  his  mind,  his 
taste  for  the  eccentric,  amorphous,  and  violent 
in  men  became  excessive,  disturbing  more  and 
more  his  perception  of  the  more  commonplace 
attributes  which  give  consistency  to  portraiture. 


242  CARLYLE 

His  "  French  Revolution  "  is  a  series  of  lurid 
pictures,  unmatched  for  vehement  power,  in 
which  the  figures  of  such  sons  of  earth  as  Mira- 
beau  and  Danton  loom  gigantic  and  terrible  as 
in  the  glare  of  an  eruption,  their  shadows  sway 
ing  far  and  wide,  grotesquely  awful.  But  all  is 
painted  by  eruption  flashes  in  violent  light  and 
shade.  There  are  no  half  tints,  no  gradations, 
and  one  finds  it  impossible  to  account  for  the 
continuance  in  power  of  less  Titanic  actors  in 
the  tragedy  like  Robespierre,  on  any  theory 
whether  of  human  nature  or  of  individual  char 
acter  supplied  by  Mr.  Carlyle.  Of  his  success, 
however,  in  accomplishing  what  he  aimed  at, 
which  was  to  haunt  the  mind  with  memories  of 
a  horrible  political  nightmare,  there  can  be  no 
doubt. 

Goethe  says,  apparently  thinking  of  Richter, 
"  The  worthy  Germans  have  persuaded  them 
selves  that  the  essence  of  true  humor  is  form 
lessness."  Heine  had  not  yet  shown  that  a 
German  might  combine  the  most  airy  humor 
with  a  sense  of  form  as  delicate  as  Goethe's  own, 
and  that  there  was  no  need  to  borrow  the  bow 
of  Philoctetes  for  all  kinds  of  game.  Mr.  Car- 
lyle's  own  tendency  was  toward  the  lawless,  and 
the  attraction  of  Jean  Paul  made  it  an  over 
mastering  one.  Goethe,  I  think,  might  have 
gone  farther,  and  affirmed  that  nothing  but  the 
highest  artistic  sense  can  prevent  humor  from 


CARLYLE  243 

degenerating  into  the  grotesque,  and  thence 
downwards  to  utter  anarchy.  Rabelais  is  a  strik 
ing  example  of  it.  The  moral  purpose  of  his 
book  cannot  give  it  that  unity  which  the  instinct 
and  forethought  of  art  only  can  bring  forth. 
Perhaps  we  owe  the  masterpiece  of  humorous 
literature  to  the  fact  that  Cervantes  had  been 
trained  to  authorship  in  a  school  where  form 
predominated  over  substance,  and  the  most 
convincing  proof  of  the  supremacy  of  art  at  the 
highest  period  of  Greek  literature  is  to  be  found 
in  Aristophanes.  Mr.  Carlyle  has  no  artistic  J 
sense  of  form  or  rhythm,  scarcely  of  proportion.*^ 
Accordingly  he  looks  on  verse  with  contempt/ 
as  something  barbarous,  —  the  savage  ornament 
which  a  higher  refinement  will  abolish,  as  it  has 
tattooing  and  nose-rings.  With  a  conceptive 
imagination  vigorous  beyond  any  in  his  genera 
tion,  with  a  mastery  of  language  equalled  only 
by  the  greatest  poets,  he  wants  altogether  the 
plastic  imagination,  the  shaping  faculty,  which 
would  have  made  him  a  poet  in  the  highest 
sense.  He  is  a  preacher jand^  a  prophet,  —  any 
thing  yotr  will, '===^j^LlaiL.ai:dst  iie  *4&~«  not,  and 
never  can  be.  It  is  always  the  knots  and  gnarls 
of  the  oak  that  he  admires,  never  the  perfect 
and  balanced  tree. 

It  is  certainly  more  agreeable  to  be  grateful 
for  what  we  owe  an  author  than  to  blame  him 
for  what  he  cannot  give  us.  But  it  is  sometimes 


244  CARLYLE 

the  business  of  a  critic  to  trace  faults  of  style 
and  of  thought  to  their  root  in  character  and 
temperament,  to  show  their  necessary  relation 
to,  and  dependence  on,  each  other,  and  to  find 
some  more  trustworthy  explanation  than  mere 
wantonness  of  will  for  the  moral  obliquities  of  a 
man  so  largely  moulded  and  gifted  as  Mr.  Car- 
lyle.  So  long  as  he  was  merely  an  exhorter  or 
dehorter,  we  were  thankful  for  such  eloquence, 
such  humor,  such  vivid  or  grotesque  images, 
and  such  splendor  of  illustration  as  only  he 
could  give ;  but  when  he  assumes  to  be  a 
teacher  of  moral  and  political  philosophy,  when 
he  himself  takes  to  compounding  the  social 
panaceas  he  has  made  us  laugh  at  so  often,  and 
advertises  none  as  genuine  but  his  own,  we 
begin  to  inquire  into  his  qualifications  and  his 
defects,  and  to  ask  ourselves  whether  his  patent 
pill  differ  from  others  except  in  the  larger 
amount  of  aloes,  or  have  any  better  recommen 
dation  than  the  superior  advertising  powers  of 
a  mountebank  of  genius.  Comparative  criticism 
teaches  us  that  moral  and  aesthetic  defects  are 
more  nearly  related  than  is  commonly  supposed. 
Had  Mr.  Carlyle  been  fitted  out  completely 
by  nature  as  an  artist,  he  would  have  had  an 
ideal  in  his  work  which  would  have  lifted  his 
mind  away  from  the  muddier  part  of  him, 
and  trained  him  to  the  habit  of  seeking  and  see 
ing  the  harmony  rather  than  the  discord  and 


CARLYLE  245 

contradiction  of  things.  His  innate  love  of  the 
picturesque  (which  is  only  another  form  of  the 
sentimentalism  he  so  scoffs  at,  perhaps  as  feel 
ing  it  a  weakness  in  himself),1  once  turned  in 
the  direction  of  character,  and  finding  its  chief 
satisfaction  there,  led  him  to  look  for  that  ideal 
of  human  nature  in  individual  men  which  is  but 
fragmentarily  represented  in  the  entire  race,  and 
is  rather  divined  from  the  aspiration,  forever 
disenchanted  to  be  forever  renewed,  of  the  im 
mortal  part  in  us,  than  found  in  any  example 
of  actual  achievement.  A  wiser  temper  would 
have  seen  something  more  consoling  than  dis 
heartening  in  the  continual  failure  of  men  emi 
nently  endowed  to  reach  the  standard  of  this 
spiritual  requirement,  would  perhaps  have  found 
in  it  an  inspiring  hint  that  it  is  mankind,  and  not 
special  men,  that  are  to  be  shaped  at  last  into 
the  image  of  God,  and  that  the  endless  life  of 
the  generations  may  hope  to  come  nearer  that 
goal  of  which  the  short-breathed  threescore  years 
and  ten  fall  too  unhappily  short. 

But  Mr.  Carlyle  has  invented  the  Hero-cure, 
and  all  who  recommend  any  other  method,  or 
see  any  hope  of  healing  elsewhere,  are  either 
quacks  and  charlatans  or  their  victims.  His 

1  Thirty  years  ago,  when  this  was  written,  I  ventured  only 
a  hint  that  Carlyle  was  essentially  a  sentimentalist.  In  what 
has  been  published  since  his  death  I  find  proof  of  what  I  had 
divined  rather  than  definitely  formulated.  (1888.) 


246  CARLYLE 

lively  imagination  conjures  up  the  image  of  an 
impossible  he,  as  contradictorily  endowed  as  the 
chief  personage  in  a  modern  sentimental  novel, 
\vho,  at  all  hazards,  must  not  lead  mankind  like 
a  shepherd,  but  bark,  bite,  and  otherwise  worry 
them  toward  the  fold  like  a  truculent  sheep-dog. 
If  Mr.  Carlyle  would  only  now  and  then  recol 
lect  that  men  are  men,  and  not  sheep,  nay,  that 
the  farther  they  are  from  being  such,  the  more 
well  grounded  our  hope    of  one  day  making 
something  better  of  them  !    It  is  indeed  strange 
that    one    who  values  Will  so    highly  in    the 
greatest  should  be  blind  to  its  infinite  worth  in 
the  least  of  men  ;  nay,  that  he  should  so  often 
seem  to  confound  it  with  its  irritable  and  pur 
poseless    counterfeit,  Wilfulness.    The   natural 
impatience    of    an    imaginative    temperament, 
which  conceives  so  vividly  the  beauty  and  de 
sirableness  of  a  nobler  manhood  and  a  diviner 
political    order,    makes    him    fret  at   the   slow 
moral  processes  by  which  the  All-Wise  brings 
about  his  ends,  and  turns  the  very  foolishness 
of  men  to  his  praise  and  glory.    Mr.  Carlyle  is 
for  calling  down  fire  from  Heaven  whenever  he 
cannot  readily  lay  his  hand  on  the  match-box. 
No    doubt  it  is  somewhat    provoking    that  it 
should  be  so  easy  to  build  castles  in  the  air,  and 
so   hard   to  find   tenants  for  them.    It  is  a  sin 
gular   intellectual  phenomenon   to   see  a  man, 
who  earlier  in  life  so  thoroughly  appreciated  the 


CARLYLE  247 

innate  weakness  and  futile  tendency  of  the 
"storm  and  thrust"  period  of  German  literature, 
constantly  assimilating,  as  he  grows  older,  more 
and  more  nearly  to  its  principles  and  practice.  It 
is  no  longer  the  sagacious  and  moderate  Goethe 
who  is  his  type  of  what  is  highest  in  human 
nature,  but  far  rather  some  Gotz  of  the  Iron 
Hand,  some  asserter  of  the  divine  legitimacy 
of  Faustrecht.  It  is  odd  to  conceive  the  fate 
of  Mr.  Carlyle  under  the  sway  of  any  of  his 
heroes,  how  Cromwell  would  have  scorned  him 
as  a  babbler  more  long-winded  than  Prynne,  but 
less  clear  and  practical,  how  Friedrich  would 
have  scoffed  at  his  tirades  as  dummes  Zeug  not 
to  be  compared  with  the  romances  of  Crebillon 
fih)  or  possibly  have  clapped  him  in  a  marching 
regiment  as  a  fit  subject  for  the  cane  of  the 
sergeant.  Perhaps  something  of  Mr.  Carlyle's 
irritability  is  to  be  laid  to  the  account  of  his 
early  schoolmastership  at  Kirkcaldy.  This  great 
booby  World  is  such  a  dull  boy,  and  will  not 
learn  the  lesson  we  have  taken  such  pains  in 
expounding  for  the  fiftieth  time.  Well,  then, 
if  eloquence,  if  example,  if  the  awful  warning  of 
other  little  boys  who  neglected  their  accidence 
and  came  to  the  gallows,  if  none  of  these  avail, 
the  birch  at  least  is  left,  and  we  will  try  that. 
The  dominie  spirit  has  become  every  year 
more  obtrusive  and  intolerant  in  Mr.  Carlyle's 
writing,  and  the  rod,  instead  of  being  kept  in 


248  CARLYLE 

its  place  as  a  resource  for  desperate  cases,  has 
become  the  alpha  and  omega  of  all  successful 
training,  the  one  divinely  appointed  means  of 
human  enlightenment  and  progress,  in  short,  the 
final  hope  of  that  absurd  animal  who  fancies 
himself  a  little  lower  than  the  angels.  Have  we 
feebly  taken  it  for  granted  that  the  distinction 
of  man  was  reason  ?  Never  was  there  a  more 
fatal  misconception.  It  is  in  the  gift  of  unreason 
that  we  are  unenviably  distinguished  from  the 
brutes,  whose  nobler  privilege  of  instinct  saves 
them  from  our  blunders  and  our  crimes. 

But  since  Mr.  Carlyle  has  become  possessed 
with  the  hallucination  that  he  is  head-master  cf 
this  huge  boys'  school  which  we  call  the  World, 
his  pedagogic  birch  has  grown  to  the  taller  pro 
portions  and  more  ominous  aspect  of  a  gallows. 
His  article  on  Dr.  Francia  was  a  panegyric  of 
the  halter,  in  which  the  gratitude  of  mankind  is 
invoked  for  the  self-appointed  dictator  who  had 
discovered  in  Paraguay  a  tree  more  beneficent 
than  that  which  produced  the  Jesuits*  bark. 
Mr.  Carlyle  seems  to  be  in  the  condition  of  a 
man  who  uses  stimulants,  and  must  increase  his 
dose  from  day  to  day  as  the  senses  become 
dulled  under  the  spur.  He  began  by  admir 
ing  strength  of  character  and  purpose  and  the 
manly  self-denial  which  makes  a  humble  fortune 
great  by  steadfast  loyalty  to  duty.  He  has  gone 
on  till  mere  strength  has  become  such  washy 


CARLYLE  249 

weakness  that  there  is  no  longer  any  titillation  in 
it;  and  nothing  short  of  downright  violence  will 
rouse  his  nerves  now  to  the  needed  excitement. 
At  first  he  made  out  very  well  with  remarkable 
men  ;  then,  lessening  the  water  and  increasing 
the  spirit,  he  took  to  Heroes:  and  now  he  must 
have  downright  /^humanity,  or  the  draught  has 
no  savor ;  so  he  gets  on  at  last  to  Kings,  types 
of  remorseless  Force,  who  maintain  the  political 
views  of  Berserkers  by  the  legal  principles  of 
Lynch.  Constitutional  monarchy  is  a  failure,  re 
presentative  government  is  a  gabble,  democracy 
a  birth  of  the  bottomless  pit;  there  is  no  hope 
for  mankind  except  in  getting  themselves  under 
a  good  driver  who  shall  not  spare  the  lash.  And 
yet,  unhappily  for  us,  these  drivers  are  provi 
dential  births  not  to  be  contrived  by  any  cun 
ning  of  ours,  and  Friedrich  II.  is  hitherto  the 
last  of  them.  Meanwhile  the  world's  wheels 
have  got  fairly  stalled  in  mire  and  other  matter 
of  every  vilest  consistency  and  most  disgustful 
smell.  What  are  we  to  do  ?  Mr.  Carlyle  will  J 
not  let  us  make  a  lever  with  a  rail  from  the  next 
fence,  or  call  in  the  neighbors.  That  would  be  I 
too  commonplace  and  cowardly,  too  anarchical. 
No ;  he  would  have  us  sit  down  beside  him  in 
the  slough  and  shout  lustily  for  Hercules.  If 
that  indispensable  demigod  will  not  or  cannot 
come,  we  can  find  a  useful  and  instructive  sol 
ace,  during  the  intervals  of  shouting,  in  a  hearty 


250  CARLYLE 

abuse  of  human  nature,  which,  at  the  long  last, 
\is  always  to  blame. 
J     Since   "Sartor    Resartus "    Mr.   Carlyle   has 

y  done  little  but  repeat  himself  with  increasing 

J    emphasis  and   heightened  shrillness.    Warning 

has  steadily  heated  toward  denunciation,  and  re- 

.    I  monstrance  soured  toward  scolding.    The  image 

*  *  of  the  Tartar  prayer-mill,  which  he  borrowed 
from  Richter  and  turned  to  such  humorous 
purpose,  might  be  applied  to  himself.  The  same 
phrase  comes  round  and  round,  only  the  ma- 
chine»  being  a  little  crankier,  rattles  more, 
the  performer  is  called  on  for  a  more  visible  ex- 
ertion.  If  there  be  not  something  very  like  cant 
in  Mr.  Carlyle's  later  writings,  then  cant  is  not 
the  repetition  of  a  creed  after  it  has  become  a 
phrase  by  the  cooling  of  that  white-hot  convic 
tion  which  once  made  it  both  the  light  and 
warmth  of  the  soul.  I  do  not  mean  intentional 
and  deliberate  cant,  but  neither  is  that  which 
Mr.  Carlyle  denounces  so  energetically  in  his 
fellow  men  of  that  conscious  kind.  I  do  not  mean 
to  blame  him  for  it,  but  mention  it  rather  as  an 
interesting  phenomenon  of  human  nature.  The 
stock  of  ideas  which  mankind  has  to  work  with 
is  very  limited,  like  the  alphabet,  and  can  at  best 
have  an  air  of  freshness  given  it  by  new  arrange 
ments  and  combinations,  or  by  application  to 
new  times  and  circumstances.  Montaigne  is  but 
Ecclesiastes  writing  in  the  sixteenth  century, 


CARLYLE  251 

Voltaire  but  Luclan  in  the  eighteenth.  Yet  both 
are  original,  and  so  certainly  is  Mr.  Carlyle, 
whose  borrowing  is  mainly  from  his  own  former 
works.  But  he  does  this  so  often  and  so  openly 
that  we  may  at  least  be  sure  that  he  ceased  grow 
ing  a  number  of  years  ago,  and  is  a  remarkable 
example  of  arrested  development. 

The  cynicism,  however,  which  has  now  be- 
confe  the  prevailing  temper  of  his  mind,  has  gone 
on  expanding  with  unhappy  vigor.  In  Mr.  Car 
lyle  it  is  not,  certainly,  as  in  Swift,  the  result  of 
personal  disappointment,  and  of  the  fatal  eye 
of  an  accomplice  for  the  mean  qualities  by  which 
power  could  be  attained  that  it  might  be  used 
for  purposes  as  mean.  It  seems  rather  the  natu 
ral  corruption  of  his  exuberant  humor.  Humor 
in  its  first  analysis  is  a  perception  of  the  incon 
gruous,  and  in  its  highest  development,  of  the 
incongruity  between  the  actual  and  the  ideal  in 
men  and  life.  With  so  keen  a  sense  of  the  ludi-  j 
crous  contrast  between  what  men  might  be,  nay,c^ 
wish  to  be,  and  what  they  are,  and  with  a  vehe-  \ 
ment  nature  that  demands  the  instant  realization 
of  his  vision  of  a  world  altogether  heroic,  it  is  J 
no  wonder  that  Mr.  Carlyle,  always  hoping 
a  thing  and  always  disappointed,  should  become 
bitter.  Perhaps  if  he  expected  less  he  would  find 
more.  Saul  seeking  his  father's  asses  found  him 
self  turned  suddenly  into  a  king;  but  Mr.  Car 
lyle,  on  the  lookout  for  a  king,  always  seems  to 


*$2  CARLYLE 

find  the  other  sort  of  animal.  He  sees  nothing 
on  any  side  of  him  but  a  procession  of  the  Lord 
of  Misrule,  in  gloomier  moments,  a  Dance  of 
Death,  where  everything  is  either  a  parody  of 
whatever  is  noble,  or  an  aimless  jig  that  stumbles 
at  last  into  the  annihilation  of  the  grave,  and  so 
passes  from  one  nothing  to  another.  Is  a  world, 
then,  which  buys  and  reads  Mr.  Carlyle's  works 
distinguished  only  for  its  "  fair,  large  ears  "  ?  If 
he  who  has  read  and  remembered  so  much  would 
only  now  and  then  call  to  mind  the  old  prcverb, 
Nee  deuS)  nee  lupus ,  sed  homo  !  If  he  would  only 
recollect  that,  from  the  days  of  the  first  grand 
father,  everybody  has  remembered  a  golden  age 
behind  him  !  No  doubt  Adam  depreciated  the 
apple  which  the  little  Cain  on  his  knee  was 
crunching,  by  comparison  with  those  he  himself 
had  tasted  in  Eden. 

The  very  qualities,  it  seems  to  me,  which  came 
so  near  making  a  great  poet  of  Mr.  Carlyle,  dis 
qualify  him  for  the  office  of  historian.  The 
poet's  concern  is  with  the  appearances  of  things, 
with  their  harmony  in  that  whole  which  the 
imagination  demands  for  its  satisfaction,  and 
their  truth  to  that  ideal  nature  which  is  the  pro 
per  object  of  poetry.  History,  unfortunately,  is 
very  far  from  being  ideal,  still  farther  from  an 
exclusive  interest  in  those  heroic  or  typical  fig 
ures  which  answer  all  the  wants  of  the  epic  and 
the  drama  and  fill  their  utmost  artistic  limits. 


CARLYLE  253 

Mr.  Carlyle  has  an  unequalled  power  and  vivid 
ness  in  painting  detached  scenes,  in  bringing  out 
in  their  full  relief  the  oddities  or  peculiarities  of 
character  ;  but  he  has  a  far  feebler  sense  of  those 
gradual  changes  of  opinion,  that  strange  com 
munication  of  sympathy  from  mind  to  mind, 
that  subtle  influence  of  very  subordinate  actors 
in  giving  a  direction  to  policy  or  action,  which 
we  are  wont  somewhat  vaguely  to  call  the  pro 
gress  of  events.  His  scheme  of  history  is  purely 
an  epical  one,  where  only  leading  figures  appear 
by  name  and  are  in  any  strict  sense  operative. 
He  has  no  conception  of  the  people  as  anything 
else  than  an  element  of  mere  brute  force  in 
political  problems,  and  would  sniff  scornfully  at 
that  unpicturesque  common  sense  of  the  many, 
which  comes  slowly  to  its  conclusions,  no  doubt, 
but  compels  obedience  even  from  rulers  the  most 
despotic  when  once  its  mind  is  made  up.  His 
history  of  Frederick  is,  of  course,  a  Fritziad; 
but  next  to  his  hero,  the  cane  of  the  drill-ser 
geant  and  iron  ramrods  appear  to  be  the  condi 
tions  which  to  his  mind  satisfactorily  account  for 
the  result  of  the  Seven  Years'  War.  It  is  our 
opinion,  which  subsequent  events  seem  to  jus 
tify,  that,  had  there  not  been  in  the  Prussian 
people  a  strong  instinct  of  nationality,  Protest 
ant  nationality  too,  and  an  intimate  conviction 
of  its  advantages,  the  war  might  have  ended 
quite  otherwise.  Frederick  II.  left  the  machine 


254  CARLYLE 

of  war  which  he  received  from  his  father  even 
more  perfect  than  he  found  it,  yet  within  a  few 
years  of  his  death  it  went  to  pieces  before  the 
shock  of  French  armies  animated  by  an  idea. 
Again  a  few  years,  and  the  Prussian  soldiery, 
inspired  once  more  by  the  old  national  fervor, 
were  victorious.  After  all,  is  it  not  moral  forces 
that  make  the  heaviest  battalions,  other  things 
being  tolerably  equal  ?  Were  it  not  for  the 
purely  picturesque  bias  of  Mr.  Carlyle's  genius, 
for  the  necessity  which  his  epical  treatment  lays 
upon  him  of  always  having  a  protagonist,  we 
should  be  astonished  that  an  idealist  like  him 
should  have  so  little  faith  in  ideas  and  so  much 
in  matter. 

Mr.  Carlyle's  manner  is  not  so  well  suited  to 
the  historian  as  to  the  essayist.  He  is  always 
great  in  single  figures  and  striking  episodes,  but 
there  is  neither  gradation  nor  continuity.  He 
has  extraordinary  patience  and  conscientiousness 
in  the  gathering  and  sifting  of  his  material,  but 
is  scornful  of  commonplace  facts  and  characters, 
impatient  of  whatever  will  not  serve  for  one  of 
his  clever  sketches,  or  group  well  in  a  more 
elaborate  figure-piece.  He  sees  history,  as  it 
were,  by  flashes  of  lightning.  A  single  scene, 
whether  a  landscape  or  an  interior,  a  single 
figure  or  a  wild  mob  of  men,  whatever  may  be 
snatched  by  the  eye  in  that  instant  of  intense 
illumination,  is  minutely  photographed  upon 


CARLYLE  255 

the  memory.  Every  tree  and  stone,  almost  every 
blade  of  grass ;  every  article  of  furniture  in  a 
room  ;  the  attitude  or  expression,  nay,  the  very 
buttons  and  shoe-ties  of  a  principal  figure;  the 
gestures  of  momentary  passion  in  a  wild  throng, 
• — everything  leaps  into  vision  under  that  sud 
den  glare  with  a  painful  distinctness  that  leaves 
the  retina  quivering.  The  intervals  are  absolute 
darkness.  Mr.  Carlyle  makes  us  acquainted  with 
the  isolated  spot  where  we  happen  to  be  when 
the  flash  comes,  as  if  by  actual  eyesight,  but 
there-  is  no  possibility  of  a  comprehensive  view. 
No  other  writer  compares  with  him  for  vivid 
ness.  He  is  himself  a  witness,  and  makes  us 
witnesses  of  whatever  he  describes.  This  is 
genius  beyond  a  question,  and  of  a  very  rare 
quality,  but  it  is  not  history.  He  has  not  the 
cold-blooded  impartiality  of  the  historian  ;  and 
while  he  entertains  us,  moves  us  to  tears  or 
laughter,  makes  us  the  unconscious  captives  of 
his  ever-changeful  mood,  we  find  that  he  has 
taught  us  comparatively  little.  His  imagination 
is  so  powerful  that  it  makes  him  the  contempo 
rary  of  his  characters,  and  thus  his  history  seems 
to  be  the  memoirs  of  a  cynical  humorist,  with 
hearty  likes  and  dislikes,  with  something  of 
acridity  in  his  partialities  whether  for  or  against, 
more  keenly  sensitive  to  the  grotesque  than  to 
the  simply  natural,  and  who  enters  in  his  diary, 
even  of  what  comes  within  the  range  of  his  own 


256  CARLYLE 

observation,  only  so  much  as  amuses  his  fancy, 
is  congenial  with  his  humor,  or  feeds  his  pre 
judice.  Mr.  Carlyle's  method  is  accordingly 
altogether  pictorial,  his  hasty  temper  making 
narrative  wearisome  to  him.  I  n  his  "  Friedrich," 
for  example,  we  get  very  little  notion  of  the  civil 
administration  of  Prussia  ;  and  when  he  comes, 
in  the  last  volume,  to  his  hero's  dealings  with 
civil  reforms,  he  confesses  candidly  that  it  would 
tire  him  too  much  to  tell  us  about  it,  even  if 
ie  knew  anything  at  all  satisfactory  himself. 

Mr.  Carlyle's  historical  compositions  arewon- 
derful  prose  poems,  full  of  picture,  incident, 
humor,  and  character,  where  we  grow  familiar 
with  his  conception  of  certain  leading  person 
ages,  and  even  of  subordinate  ones,  if  they  are 
necessary  to  the  scene,  so  that  they  come  out 
living  upon  the  stage  from  the  dreary  limbo  of 
names  ;  but  this  is  no  more  history  than  the 
historical  plays  of  Shakespeare.  There  is  no 
thing  in  imaginative  literature  superior  in  its  own 
way  to  the  episode  of  Voltaire  in  the  Fritziad. 
It  is  delicious  in  humor,  masterly  in  minute 
characterization.  We  feel  as  if  the  principal 
victim  (for  we  cannot  help  feeling  all  the  while 
that  he  is  so)  of  this  mischievous  genius  had 
been  put  upon  the  theatre  before  us  by  some 
perfect  mimic  like  Foote,  who  had  studied  his 
habitual  gait,  gestures,  tones,  turn  of  thought, 
costume,  trick  of  feature,  and  rendered  them 


CARLYLE  257 

with  the  slight  dash  of  caricature  needful  to 
make  the  whole  composition  tell.  It  is  in  such 
things  that  Mr.  Carlyle  is  beyond  all  rivalry, 
and  that  we  must  go  back  to  Shakespeare  for  a 
comparison.  But  the  mastery  of  Shakespeare  is 
shown  perhaps  more  strikingly  in  his  treatment 
of  the  ordinary  than  of  the  exceptional.  His 
is  the  gracious  equality  of  Nature  herself.  Mr. 
Carlyle's  gift  is  rather  in  the  representation  than 
in  the  evolution  of  character;  and  it  is  a  neces 
sity  of  his  art,  therefore,  to  exaggerate  slightly 
his  heroic,  and  to  caricature  in  like  manner  his 
comic  parts.  His  appreciation  is  less  psycholog 
ical  than  physical  and  external.  Grimm  relates 
that  Garrick,  riding  once  with  Preville,  proposed 
to  him  that  they  should  counterfeit  drunkenness. 
They  rode  through  Passy  accordingly,  deceiving 
all  who  saw  them.  When  beyond  the  town 
Preville  asked  how  he  had  succeeded.  "  Excel 
lently,"  said  Garrick,  "  as  to  your  body  ;  but 
your  legs  were  not  tipsy."  Mr.  Carlyle  would 
be  as  exact  in  his  observation  of  nature  as  the 
great  actor,  and  would  make  us  see  a  drunken 
man  as  well ;  but  we  doubt  whether  he  could 
have  conceived  that  unmatchable  scene  in  "An 
tony  and  Cleopatra,"  where  the  tipsiness  of 
Lepidus  pervades  the  whole  metaphysical  no 
less  than  the  physical  part  of  the  triumvir.  If  his 
sympathies  bore  any  proportion  to  his  instinct 
for  catching  those  traits  which  are  the  expression 


2  ?8  CARLYLE 

of  character,  but  not  character  itself,  we  might 
have  had  a  great  historian  in  him  instead  of  a  his 
tory-painter.  But  that  which  is  a  main  element  in 
Mr.  Carlyle's  talent, and  does  perhaps  more  than 
anything  else  to  make  it  effective,  is  a  defect 
of  his  nature.  The  cynicism  which  renders  him 
so  entertaining  precludes  him  from  any  just 
conception  of  men  and  their  motives,  and  from 
any  sane  estimate  of  the  relative  importance  of 
the  events  which  concern  them.  I  remember  a 
picture  of  Hamon's,  where  before  a  Punch's 
theatre  are  gathered  the  wisest  of  mankind  in 
rapt  attention.  Socrates  sits  on  a  front  bench, 
absorbed  in  the  spectacle,  and  in  the  corner 
stands  Dante  making  entries  in  his  note-book. 
Mr.  Carlyle  as  an  historian  leaves  us  in  some 
what  such  a  mood.  The  world  is  a  puppet- 
show,  and  when  we  have  watched  the  play  out, 
we  depart  with  a  half-comic  consciousness  of 
the  futility  of  all  human  enterprise,  and  the 
ludicrousness  of  all  man's  action  and  passion 
on  the  stage  of  the  world.  Simple,  kindly,  blun 
dering  Oliver  Goldsmith  was  after  all  wiser, 
and  his  Vicar,  ideal  as  Hector  and  not  less 
immortal,  is  a  demonstration  of  the  perennial 
beauty  and  heroism  of  the  homeliest  human 
nature.  The  cynical  view  is  congenial  to  certain 
moods,  and  is  so  little  inconsistent  with  original 
nobleness  of  mind  that  it  is  not  seldom  the 
acetous  fermentation  of  it ;  but  it  is  the  view 


CARLYLE  259 

of  the  satirist,  not  of  the  historian,  and  takes  in 
but  a  narrow  arc  in  the  circumference  of  truth. 
Cynicism  in  itself  is  essentially  disagreeable.  It 
is  the  intellectual  analogue  of  the  truffle  ;  and 
though  it  may  be  very  well  in  giving  a  relish  to 
thought  for  certain  palates,  it  cannot  supply  the 
substance  of  it.  Mr.  Carlyle's  cynicism  is  not 
that  high-bred  weariness  of  the  outsides  of  life" 
which  we  find  in  Ecclesiastes.  It  goes  much 
deeper  than  that  to  the  satisfactions,  not  of  the  / 
body  or  the  intellect,  but  of  the  very  soul  as 
well.  It  vaunts  itself;  it  is  noisy  and  aggressive.  / 
What  the  wise  master  puts  into  the  mouth  of 
desperate  ambition,  thwarted  of  the  fruit  of  its 
crime,  as  the  fitting  expression  of  passionate 
sophistry,  seems  to  have  become  an  article  of 
his  creed.  With  him 

"  Life  is  a  tale 

Told  by  an  idiot,  full  of  sound  and  fury, 
Signifying  nothing." 

He  goes  about  with  his  Diogenes  dark  lantern, 
professing  to  seek  a  man,  but  inwardly  resolved 
to  find  a  monkey.  He  loves  to  flash  it  sud 
denly  on  poor  human  nature  in  some  ridicu 
lous  or  degrading  posture.  He  admires  still,  or 
keeps  affirming  that  he  admires,  the  doughty, 
silent,  hard-working  men  who  go  honestly 
about  their  business  ;  but  when  we  come  to  his 
later  examples,  we  find  that  it  is  not  loyalty  to 


260  CARLYLE 

duty  or  to  an  inward  ideal  of  high-mindedness 
that  he  finds  admirable  in  them,  but  a  blind 
unquestioning  vassalage  to  whomsoever  it  has 
pleased  him  to  set  up  for  a  hero.  He  would 
fain  replace  the  old  feudalism  with  a  spiritual 
counterpart,  in  which  there  shall  be  an  obliga 
tion  to  soul  service.  He  who  once  popularized 
the  word  flunkey  by  ringing  the  vehement 
changes  of  his  scorn  upon  it,  is  at  last  forced 
to  conceive  an  ideal  flunkeyism  to  squire  the 
hectoring  Don  Belianises  of  his  fancy  about  the 
world.  Failing  this,  his  latest  theory  of  Divine 
government  seems  to  be  the  cudgel.  Poets 
have  sung  all  manner  of  vegetable  loves ;  Pe 
trarch  has  celebrated  the  laurel,  Chaucer  the 
daisy,  and  Wordsworth  the  gallows-tree ;  it 
remained  for  the  ex-pedagogue  of  Kirkcaldy  to 
become  the  volunteer  laureate  of  the  rod  and 
to  imagine  a  world  created  and  directed  by  a 
divine  Dr.  Busby.  We  cannot  help  thinking 
that  Mr.  Carlyle  might  have  learned  something 
to  his  advantage  by  living  a  few  years  in  the 
democracy  which  he  scoffs  at  as  heartily  a  -priori 
as  if  it  were  the  demagogism  which  Aristo 
phanes  derided  from  experience.  The  hero,  as 
Mr.  Carlyle  understands  him,  was  a  makeshift 
of  the  past ;  and  the  ideal  of  manhood  is  to  be 
found  hereafter  in  free  communities,  where  the 
state  shall  at  length  sum  up  and  exemplify  in 
itself  all  those  qualities  which  poets  were  forced 


CARLYLE  26l 

to  imagine  and  typify  because  they  could  not 
find  them  in  the  actual  world. 

In  the  earlier  part  of  his  literary  career, 
Mr.  Carlyle  was  the  denouncer  of  shams,  the 
^rmmhur-ilp  of  sincerity,  manliness,  and  a  liv 
ing  faith,  instead  of  a  droning  ritual.  He  had 
intense  convictions,  and  he  made  disciples. 
With  a  compass  of  diction  unequalled  by  any 
other  public  performer  of  the  time,  ranging  as 
it  did  from  the  unbookish  freshness  of  the 
Scottish  peasant  to  the  most  far-sought  phrase 
of  literary  curiosity,  with  humor,  pathos,  and 
eloquence  at  will,  it  was  no  wonder  that  he 
found  eager  listeners  in  a  world  longing  for  a 
sensation,  and  forced  to  put  up  with  the  West- 
End  gospel  of  "  Pelham."  If  not  a  profound 
thinker,  he  had  what  was  next  best,  —  he  felt 
profoundly,  and  his  cry  came  out  of  the  depths. 
The  stern  Calvinism  of  his  early  training  was 
rekindled  by  his  imagination  to  the  old  fer 
vor  of  Wishart  and  Brown,  and  became  a  new 
phenomenon  as  he  reproduced  it  subtilized  by 
German  transcendentalism  and  German  cul 
ture.  Imagination,  if  it  lay  hold  of  a  Scotchman, 
possesses  him  in  the  old  demoniac  sense  of 
the  word,  and  that  hard  logical  nature,  if  the 
Hebrew  fire  once  get  fair  headway  in  it,  burns 
unquenchable  as  an  anthracite  coal-mine.  But 
to  utilize  these  sacred  heats,  to  employ  them, 
as  a  literary  man  is  always  tempted,  to  keep 


262  CARLYLE 

the  domestic  pot  a-boiling,  —  is  such  a  thing 
possible  ?  Only  too  possible,  we  fear ;  and 
Mr.  Carlyle  is  an  example  of  it.  If  the  languid 
public  long  for  a  sensation,  the  excitement  of 
making  one  becomes  also  a  necessity  of  the 
successful  author,  as  the  intellectual  nerves 
grow  duller  and  the  old  inspiration  that  came 
unbidden  to  the  bare  garret  grows  shier  and 
shier  of  the  comfortable  parlor.  As  he  himself 
said  thirty  years  ago  of  Edward  Irving,  "Un 
consciously,  for  the  most  part  in  deep  uncon 
sciousness,  there  was  now  the  impossibility  to 
live  neglected,  —  to  walk  on  the  quiet  paths 
where  alone  it  is  well  with  us.  Singularity 
must  henceforth  succeed  singularity.  O  foulest 
Circean  draught,  thcu  poison  of  Popular  Ap 
plause  !  madness  is  in  thee  and  death ;  thy  end 
is  Bedlam  and  the  grave."  Mr.  Carlyle  won 
his  first  successes  as  a  kind  of  preacher  in  print. 
His  fervor,  his  oddity  of  manner,  his  pugna 
cious  paradox,  drew  the  crowd  ;  the  truth,  or, 
at  any  rate,  the  faith  that  underlay  them  all, 
brought  also  the  fitter  audience,  though  fewer. 
But  the  curse  was  upon  him  ;  he  must  attract, 
he  must  astonish.  Thenceforth  he  has  been 
forced  to  revamp  his  telling  things;  and  the 
oddity,  as  was  inevitable,  has  become  always 
odder,  the  paradoxes  more  paradoxical.  No 
very  large  share  of  truth  falls  to  the  appre 
hension  of  any  one  man  ;  let  him  keep  it  sacred, 


CARLYLE  263 

and  beware  of  repeating  it  till  it  turn  to  false 
hood  on  his  lips  by  becoming  ritual.  Truth 
always  has  a  bewitching  savor  of  newness  in  it, 
r.nd  novelty  at  the  first  taste  recalls  that  original 
sweetness  to  the  tongue  ;  but  alas  for  him  who 
would  make  the  one  a  substitute  for  the  other ! 
We  seem  to  miss  of  late  in  Mr.  Carlyle  the  old 
sincerity.  He  has  become  the  purely  literary 
man,  less  concerned  about  what  he  says  than 
about  how  he  shall  say  it  to  best  advantage. 
The  Muse  should  be  the  companion,  not  the 
guide,  says  he  whom  Mr.  Carlyle  has  pro 
nounced  "  the  wisest  of  this  generation."  What 
would  be  a  virtue  in  the  poet  is  a  vice  of  the 
most  fatal  kind  in  the  teacher,  and,  alas  that 
we  should  say  it !  the  very  Draco  of  shams, 
whose  code  contained  no  penalty  milder  than 
capital  for  the  most  harmless  of  them,  has 
become  at  last  something  very  like  a  sham 
himself.  Mr.  Carlyle  continues  to  be  a  voice 
crying  in  the  wilderness,  but  no  longer  a  voice 
with  any  earnest  conviction  behind  it,  or  in  a 
wilderness  where  there  is  other  than  imaginary 
privation.  Hearing  him  rebuke  us  for  being 
humbugs  and  impostors,  we  are  inclined  to 
answer,  with  the  ambassador  of  Philip  II., 
when  his  master  reproached  him  with  forget 
ting  substance  in  ceremony,  "  Your  Majesty 
forgets  that  you  are  only  a  ceremony  yourself." 
And  Mr.  Carlyle's  teaching,  moreover,  if  teach- 


264  CARLYLE 

ing  we  may  call  it,  belongs  to  what  the  great 
German,  whose  disciple  he  is,  condemned  as 
the  "literature  of  despair."  An  apostle  to  the 
Gentiles  might  hope  for  some  fruit  of  his  preach 
ing  ;  but  of  what  avail  an  apostle  who  shouts 
his  message  down  the  mouth  of  the  pit  to  poor 
lost  souls,  whom  he  can  positively  assure  only 
that  it  is  impossible  to  get  out?  Mr.  Carlyle 
lights  up  the  lanterns  of  his  Pharos  after  the 
ship  is  already  rolling  between  the  tongue  of 
the  sea  and  the  grinders  of  the  reef.  It  is  very 
brilliant,  and  its  revolving  flashes  touch  the 
crests  of  the  breakers  with  an  awful  pictur- 
esqueness  ;  but  in  so  desperate  a  state  of  things, 
even  Dr.  Syntax  might  be  pardoned  for  being 
forgetful  of  the  picturesque.  The  Toryism 
of  Scott  sprang  from  love  of  the  past ;  that  of 
Carlyle  is  far  more  dangerously  infectious,  for 
it  is  logically  deduced  from  a  deep  disdain  of 
human  nature. 

Browning  has  drawn  a  beautiful  picture  of  an 
old  king  sitting  at  the  gate  of  his  palace  to  judge 
his  people  in  the  calm  sunshine  of  that  past 
which  never  existed  outside  a  poet's  brain.  It 
is  the  sweetest  of  waking  dreams,  this  of  abso 
lute  power  and  perfect  wisdom  in  one  supreme 
ruler ;  but  it  is  as  pure  a  creation  of  human 
want  and  weakness,  as  clear  a  witness  of  mortal 
limitation  and  incompleteness,  as  the  shoes  of 
swiftness,  the  cloak  of  darkness,  the  purse 


CARLYLE  265 

of  Fortunatus,  and  the  elixir  vitae.  It  is  the 
natural  refuge  of  imaginative  temperaments  im 
patient  of  our  blunders  and  shortcomings,  and, 
given  a  complete  man,  all  would  submit  to  the 
divine  right  of  his  despotism.  But  alas!  to  every 
the  most  fortunate  human  birth  hobbles  up  that 
malign  fairy  who  has  been  forgotten,  with  her 
fatal  gift  of  imperfection  !  So  far  as  my  experi 
ence  has  gone,  it  has  been  the  very  opposite  to 
Mr.  Carlyle's.  Instead  of  finding  men  disloyal 
to  their  natural  leader,  nothing  has  ever  seemed 
to  me  so  touching  as  the  gladness  with  which 
they  follow  him,  when  they  are  sure  they  have 
found  him  at  last.  But  a  natural  leader  of  the 
ideal  type  is  not  to  be  looked  for  nisi  dignus  vin- 
dice  nodus.  The  Divine  Forethought  had  been 
cruel  in  furnishing  one  for  every  petty  occasion, 
and  thus  thwarting  in  all  inferior  men  that  price 
less  gift  of  reason,  to  develop  which,  and  to 
make  it  one  with  free  will,  is  the  highest  use  of 
our  experience  on  earth.  Mr.  Carlyle  was  hard 
bestead  and  very  far  gone  in  his  idolatry  of  mere 
plucky  when  he  was  driven  to  choose  Friedrich 
as  a  hero.  A  poet,  and  Mr.  Carlyle  is  nothing 
else,  is  unwise  who  yokes  Pegasus  to  a  prosaic 
theme  which  no  force  of  wing  can  lift  from  the 
dull  earth.  Charlemagne  would  have  been  a 
wiser  choice,  far  enough  in  the  past  for  ideal 
treatment,  more  manifestly  the  Siegfried  of 
Anarchy,  and  in  his  rude  way  the  refounder 


266  CARLYLE 

of  that  empire  which  is  the  ideal  of  despotism 
in  the  Western  world. 

Friedrich  was  doubtless  a  remarkable  man, 
but  surely  very  far  below  any  lofty  standard  of 
heroic  greatness.  He  was  the  last  of  the  Euro 
pean  kings  who  could  look  upon  his  kingdom 
as  his  private  patrimony  ;  and  it  was  this  estate 
of  his,  this  piece  of  property,  which  he  so 
obstinately  and  successfully  defended.  He  had 
no  idea  of  country  as  it  was  understood  by  an 
ancient  Greek  or  Roman,  as  it  is  understood  by 
a  modern  Englishman  or  American  ;  and  there 
is  something  almost  pitiful  in  seeing  a  man  of 
genius  like  Mr.  Carlyle  righting  painfully  over 
again  those  battles  of  the  last  century  which 
settled  nothing  but  the  continuance  of  the  Prus 
sian  monarchy,  while  he  saw  only  the  "  burning 
of  a  dirty  chimney  "  in  the  war  which  a  great 
people  was  waging  under  his  very  eyes  for  the 
idea  of  nationality  and  orderly  magistrature, 
and  which  fixed,  let  us  hope,  forever,  a  bound 
ary  line  on  the  map  of  history  and  of  man's 
advancement  toward  self-conscious  and  respon 
sible  freedom.  The  true  historical  genius,  as  I 
conceive  it,  is  that  which  can  see  the  nobler 
meaning  of  events  that  are  near  him,  as  the  true 
poet  is  he  who  detects  the  divine  in  the  casual ; 
and  I  somewhat  suspect  the  depth  of  his  insight 
into  the  past,  who  cannot  recognize  the  godlike 
of  to-day  under  that  disguise  in  which  it  always 


CARLYLE  267 

visits  us.  Shall  we  hint  to  Mr.  Carlyle  that  a 
man  may  look  on  an  heroic  age,  as  well  as  on  an 
heroic  master,  with  the  eyes  of  a  valet,  as  misap- 
preciative  certainly,  though  not  so  ignoble  ? 

What  Sc  h  i  1  [er  _say_a.jo£ ~A_great ... poeV-that  Jie 
must  be  a  citizen  of  his  age  as  well  as  of  his 
country,  may  be  said  inversely  of  a  great  king. 
He  should  be  a  citizen  of  his  country  as  well  as 
of  his  age.  Friedrich  was  certainly  the  latter  in 
its  fullest  sense  ;  whether  he  was,  or  could  have 
been,  the  former,  in  any  sense,  may  be  doubted. 
The  man  who  spoke  and  wrote  French  in  pre 
ference  to  his  mother  tongue,  who,  dying  when 
Goethe  was  already  drawing  toward  his  fortieth 
year,  Schiller  toward  his  thirtieth,  and  Lessing 
had  been  already  five  years  in  his  grave,  could 
yet  see  nothing  but  barbarism  in  German  liter 
ature,  had  little  of  the  old  Teutonic  fibre  in  his 
nature.  The  man  who  pronounced  the  "Nibe- 
lungen  Lied  "  not  worth  a  pinch  of  priming,  had 
little  conception  of  the  power  of  heroic  traditions 
in  making  heroic  men,  and  especially  in  strength 
ening  that  instinct  made  up  of  so  many  indis 
tinguishable  associations  which  we  call  love  of 
country.  Charlemagne,  when  he  caused  the  old 
songs  of  his  people  to  be  gathered  and  written 
down,  showed  a  truer  sense  of  the  sources  of 
national  feeling  and  a  deeper  political  insight. 
This  want  of  sympathy  points  to  the  somewhat 
narrow  limits  of  Friedrich's  nature.  In  spite  of 


268  CARLYLE 

Mr.  Carlyle's  adroit  statement  of  the  case  (and 
the  whole  book  has  an  air  of  being  the  plea  of 
a  masterly  advocate  in  mitigation  of  sentence), 
we  feel  that  his  hero  was  essentially  hard,  narrow, 
and  selfish.  His  popularity  will  go  for  little  with 
any  one  who  has  studied  the  trifling  and  often 
fabulous  elements  that  make  up  that  singular 
compound.  A  bluntness  of  speech,  a  shabby 
uniform,  a  frugal  camp  equipage,  a  timely  famil 
iarity,  may  make  a  man  the  favorite  of  an  army 
or  a  nation,  —  above  all,  if  he  have  the  knack 
of  success.  Moreover,  popularity  is  much  more 
easily  won  from  above  downward,  and  is  bought 
at  a  better  bargain  by  kings  and  generals  than 
by  other  men.  We  doubt  if  Friedrich  would 
have  been  liked  as  a  private  person,  or  even  as 
an  unsuccessful  king.  He  apparently  attached 
very  few  people  to  himself,  fewer  even  than  his 
brutal  old  Squire  Western  of  a  father.  His  sister 
Wilhelmina  is  perhaps  an  exception.  WTe  say 
perhaps,  for  we  do  not  know  how  much  the 
heroic  part  he  was  called  on  to  play  had  to  do 
with  the  matter,  and  whether  sisterly  pride  did 
not  pass  even  with  herself  for  sisterly  affection. 
Moreover  she  was  far  from  him  ;  and  Mr. 
Carlyle  waves  aside,  in  his  generous  fashion, 
some  rather  keen  comments  of  hers  on  her 
brother's  character  when  she  visited  Berlin  after 
he  had  become  king.  Indeed,  he  is  apt  to  deal 
rather  contemptuously  with  all  adverse  criticism 


CARLYLE  269 

of  his  hero.  I  sympathize  with  his  impulse  in 
this  respect,  agreeing  heartily  as  I  do  in  Chau 
cer's  scorn  of  those  who  "  vladlie  demen  to  the 

o 

baser  end  "  in  such  matters.  But  I  am  not  quite 
sure  if  this  be  a  safe  method  with  the  historian. 
He  must  doubtless  be  the  friend  of  his  hero  if 
he  would  understand  him,  but  he  must  be  more 
the  friend  of  truth  if  he  would  understand  his 
tory.  Mr.  Carlyle's  passion  for  truth  is  intense, 
as  bents  his  temper,  but  it  is  that  of  a  lover  for 
his  mistress.  He  would  have  her  all  to  himself, 
and  has  a  lover's  conviction  that  no  one  is  able, 
or  even  fit,  to  appreciate  her  but  himself.  He 
does  well  to  despise  the  tittle-tattle  of  vulgar 
minds,  but  surely  should  not  ignore  all  testi 
mony  on  the  other  side.  For  ourselves,  we 
think  it  not  unimportant  that  Goethe's  friend 
Knebel,  a  man  not  incapable  of  admiration,  and 
who  had  served  a  dozen  years  or  so  as  an  officer 
of  Friedrich's  guard,  should  have  bluntly  called 
him  "  the  tyrant." 

Mr.  Carlyle's  history  traces  the  family  of  his 
hero  down  from  its  beginnings  in  the  pictur 
esque  chiaro-scuro  of  the  Middle  Ages.  It  was 
an  able  and  above  all  a  canny  house,  a  Scotch 
version  of  the  word  able,  which  implies  thrift 
and  an  eye  to  the  main  chance,  the  said  main 
chance  or  chief  end  of  man  being  altogether 
of  this  world.  Friedrich,  inheriting  this  family 
faculty  in  full  measure,  was  driven,  partly  by 


27o  CARLYLE 

ambition,  partly  by  necessity,  to  apply  it  to  war. 
He  did  so,  with  the  success  to  be  expected  where 
a  man  of  many  expedients  has  the  good  luck  to 
be  opposed  by  men  with  few.  He  adds  another 
to  the  many  proofs  that  it  is  possible  to  be  a 
great  general  without  a  spark  of  that  divine  fire 
which  we  call  genius,  and  that  good  fortune  in 
war  results  from  the  same  prompt  talent  and 
unbending  temper  which  lead  to  the  same  result 
in  the  peaceful  professions.  Friedrich  had  cer 
tainly  more  of  the  temperament  of  genius  than 
Marlborough  or  Wellington  ;  but  not  to  go 
beyond  modern  instances,  he  docs  not  impress 
us  with  the  massive  breadth  of  Napoleon,  or 
attract  us  with  the  climbing  ardor  of  Turenne. 
To  compare  him  with  Alexander,  or  Hannibal, 
or  Caesar,  were  absurd.  The  kingship  that  was 
in  him,  and  which  W7on  Mr.  Carlyle  to  be  his 
biographer,  is  that  of  will  merely,  of  rapid  and 
relentless  command.  For  organization  he  had  a 
masterly  talent ;  but  he  could  not  apply  it  to  the 
arts  of  peace,  both  because  he  wanted  experience 
and  because  the  rash  decision  of  the  battle-field 
will  not  serve  in  matters  which  are  governed  by 
natural  laws  of  growth.  He  seems,  indeed,  to 
have  had  a  coarse,  soldier's  contempt  for  all  civil 
distinction,  altogether  unworthy  of  a  wise  king, 
or  even  of  a  prudent  one.  He  confers  the  title 
of  Hofrath  on  the  husband  of  a  wornun  with 
whom  his  General  Walrave  is  living  in  what  Mr. 


CARLYLE  171 

Carlyle  justly  calls  "  brutish  polygamy/'  and 
this  at  Walrave's  request,  on  the  ground  that 
"  a  general's  drab  ought  to  have  a  handle  to  her 
name."  Mr.  Carlyle  murmurs  in  a  mild  paren 
thesis  that  "we  rather  regret  this"!  (Vol.  in* 
p.  559.)  This  is  his  usual  way  of  treating  un 
pleasant  matters,  sidling  by  with  a  deprecating 
shrug  of  the  shoulders.  Not  that  he  ever  wil 
fully  suppresses  anything.  On  the  contrary) 
there  is  no  greater  proof  of  his  genius  than  the 
way  in  which,  while  he  seems  to  paint  a  charac 
ter  with  all  its  disagreeable  traits,  he  contrives 
to  win  our  sympathy  for  it,  nay,  almost  our 
liking.  This  is  conspicuously  true  of  his  por 
trait  of  Friedrich's  father ;  and  that  he  does  not 
succeed  in  making  Friedrich  himself  attractive 
is  a  strong  argument  with  us  that  the  fault  is  in 
the  subject  and  not  the  artist. 

The  book,  it  is  said,  has  been  comparatively 
unsuccessful  as  a  literary  venture.  Nor  do  we 
wonder  at  it.  It  is  disproportionately  long,  and 
too  much  made  up  of  those  descriptions  of  bat 
tles,  to  read  which  seems  even  more  difficult 
than  to  have  won  the  victory  itself,  more  dis 
heartening  than  to  have  suffered  the  defeat.  To 
an  American,  also,  the  warfare  seemed  Lilipu- 
tian  in  the  presence  of  a  conflict  so  much  larger 
in  its  proportions  and  significant  in  its  results. 
The  interest,  moreover,  flags  decidedly  toward 
the  close,  where  the  reader  cannot  help  feeling 


z7z  CARLYLE 

that  the  author  loses  breath  somewhat  painfully 
under  the  effort  of  so  prolonged  a  course.  Mr. 
Carlyle  has  evidently  devoted  to  his  task  a  labor 
that  may  be  justly  called  prodigious.  Not  only 
has  he  sifted  all  the  German  histories  and  me 
moirs,  but  has  visited  every  battle-field,  and  de 
scribes  them  with  an  eye  for  country  that  is 
without  rival  among  historians.  The  book  is 
evidently  an  abridgment  of  even  more  abundant 
collections,  and  yet,  as  it  stands,  the  matter 
overburdens  the  work.  It  is  a  bundle  of  lively 
episodes  rather  than  a  continuous  narrative.  In 
this  respect  it  contrasts  oddly  with  the  concinnity 
of  his  own  earlier  "  Life  of  Schiller."  But  the 
episodes  are  lively,  the  humor  and  pathos  spring 
from  a  profound  nature,  the  sketches  of  character 
are  masterly,  the  seizure  of  every  picturesque 
incident  infallible,  and  the  literary  judgments 
those  of  a  thorough  scholar  and  critic.  There 
is,  of  course,  the  usual  amusing  objurgation  of 
Dryasdust  and  his  rubbish-heaps,  the  usual  as 
sumption  of  omniscience,  and  the  usual  certainty 
of  the  Duchess  de  la  Ferte  being  always  in  the 
right;  yet  I  cannot  help  thinking  that  a  little  of 
Dry asdust'sploddingexactness  would  have  saved 
Fouquet  eleven  years  of  the  imprisonment  to 
which  Mr.  Carlyle  condemns  him,  would  have 
referred  us  to  St.  Simon  rather  than  to  Voltaire 
for  the  character  of  the  brothers  Belle-lie,  and 
would  have  kept  clear  of  a  certain  ludicrous 


CARLYLE  273 

etymology  of  the  name  Antwerp,  not  to  mention 
some  other  trifling  slips  of  the  like  nature.  In 
conclusion,  after  saying,  as  an  honest  critic  must, 
that  "The  History  of  Friedrich  II.  called  Fred 
erick  the  Great "  is  a  book  to  be  read  in  with 
more  satisfaction  than  to  be  read  through,  after 
declaring  that  it  is  open  to  all  manner  of  criticism, 
especially  in  point  of  moral  purpose  and  tend 
ency,  I  must  admit  with  thankfulness  that  it  has 
the  one  prime  merit  of  being  the  work  of  a  man 
who  has  every  quality  of  a  great  poet  except  that 
supreme  one  of  rhythm,  which  shapes  both  mat 
ter  and  manner  to  harmonious  proportion,  and 
that  where  it  is  good,  it  is  good  as  only  genius 
knows  how  to  be. 

With  the  gift  of  song,  Carlyle  would  have 
been  the  greatest  of  epic  poets  since  Homer. 
Without  it,  to  modulate  and  harmonize  and  bring 
parts  into  their  proper  relation,  he  is  the  most 
amorphous  of  humorists,  the  most  shining  ava 
tar  of  whim  the  world  has  ever  seen.  Beginning 
with  a  hearty  contempt  for  shams,  he  has  come 
at  length  to  believe  in  brute  force  as  the  only 
reality,  and  has  as  little  sense  of  justice  as  Thack 
eray  allowed  to  women.  I  say  brute  force  because, 
though  the  theory  is  that  this  force  should  be 
directed  by  the  supreme  intellect  for  the  time 
being,  yet  all  inferior  wits  are  treated  rather  as 
obstacles  to  be  contemptuously  shoved  aside 
than  as  ancillary  forces  to  be  conciliated  through 


274  CARLYLE 

their  reason.  But,  with  all  deductions,  he  remains 
the  profoundest  critic  and  the  most  dramatic 
imagination  of  modern  times.  Never  was  there 
a  more  striking  example  of  that  ingenium  perfer- 
~uidum  long  ago  said  to  be  characteristic  of  his 
countrymen.  His  is  one  of  the  natures,  rare  in 
these  latter  centuries,  capable  of  rising  to  a  white 
heat ;  but  once  fairly  kindled,  he  is  like  a  three- 
decker  on  fire,  and  his  shotted  guns  go  off,  as 
the  glow  reaches  them,  alike  dangerous  to  friend 
or  foe.  Though  he  seems  more  and  more  to  con 
found  material  with  moral  success,  yet  there  is 
always  something  wholesome  in  his  unswerving 
loyalty  to  reality,  as  he  understands  it.  History, 
in  the  true  sense,  he  does  not  and  cannot  write, 
for  he  looks  on  mankind  as  a  herd  without  voli 
tion,  and  without  moral  force ;  but  such  vivid 
pictures  of  events,  such  living  conceptions  of 
character,  we  find  nowhere  else  in  prose.  The 
figures  of  most  historians  seem  like  dolls  stuffed 
with  bran,  whose  whole  substance  runs  out 
through  any  hole  that  criticism  may  tear  in  them, 
but  Carlyle's  are  so  real  in  comparison,  that,  if 
you  prick  them,  they  bleed.  He  seems  a  little 
wearied,  here  and  there,  in  his  "  Friedrich,"  with 
the  multiplicity  of  detail,  and  does  his  filling-in 
rather  shabbily  ;  but  he  still  remains  in  his  own 
way,  like  his  hero,  the  Only,  and  such  episodes 
as  that  of  Voltaire  would  make  the  fortune 
of  any  other  writer.  Though  not  the  safest  of 


CARLYLE  275 

guides  in  politics  or  practical  philosophy,  his 
value  as  an  inspirer  and  awakener  cannot  be 
overestimated.  It  is  a  power  which  belongs 
only  to  the  highest  order  of  minds,  for  it  is  none 
but  a  divine  fire  that  can  so  kindle  and  irradiate. 
The  debt  due  him  from  those  who  listened  to 
the  teachings  of  his  prime  for  revealing  to  them 
what  sublime  reserves  of  power  even  the  hum 
blest  may  find  in  manliness,  sincerity,  and  self- 
reliance,  can  be  paid  with  nothing  short  of  re 
verential  gratitude.  As  a  purifier  of  the  sources 
whence  our  intellectual  inspiration  is  drawn,  his 
influence  has  been  second  only  to  that  of  Words 
worth,  if  even  to  his.  Indeed  he  has  been  in  no 
fanciful  sense  the  continuator  of  Wordsworth's 
moral  teaching. 


EMERSON  THE  LECTURER 

1861-68 

IT  is  a  singular  fact  that  Mr.  Emerson  is  the 
most  steadily  attractive  lecturer  in  America. 
Into  that  somewhat  cold-waterish  region  ad 
venturers  of  the  sensational  kind  come  down  now 
and  then  with  a  splash,  to  become  disregarded 
King  Logs  before  the  next  season.  But  Mr. 
Emerson  always  draws.  A  lecturer  now  for 
something  like  a  third  of  a  century,  one  of  the 
pioneers  of  the  lecturing  system,  the  charm  of 
his  voice,  his  manner,  and  his  matter  has  never 
lost  its  power  over  his  earlier  hearers,  and  contin 
ually  winds  new  ones  in  its  enchanting  meshes. 
What  they  do  not  fully  understand  they  take  on 
trust,  and  listen,  saying  to  themselves,  as  the 
old  poet  of  Sir  Philip  Sidney,  — 

"A  sweet,  attractive,  kind  of  grace, 
A  full  assurance  given  by  looks, 
Continual  comfort  in  a  face, 

The  lineaments  of  gospel  books." 

We  call  it  a  singular  fact,  because  we  Yankees 
are  thought  to  be  fond  of  the  spread-eagle  style, 
and  nothing  can  be  more  remote  from  that  than 
his.  We  are  reckoned  a  practical  folk,  who 


EMERSON   THE    LECTURER         277 

would  rather  hear  about  a  new  air-tight  stove 
than  about  Plato  ;  yet  our  favorite  teacher's 
practicality  is  not  in  the  least  of  the  Poor  Rich 
ard  variety.  If  he  have  any  Buncombe  constitu 
ency,  it  is  that  unrealized  commonwealth  of 
philosophers  which  Plotinus  proposed  to  estab 
lish  ;  and  if  he  were  to  make  an  almanac,  his 
directions  to  farmers  would  be  something  like 
this  :  "  OCTOBER  :  Indian  Summer ;  now  is  the 
time  to  get  in  your  early  Vedas."  What,  then, 
is  his  secret?  Is  it  not  that  he  out- Yankees  us 
all?  that  his  range  includes  us  all?  that  he  is 
equally  at  home  with  the  potato-disease  and 
original  sin,  with  pegging  shoes  and  the  Over- 
Soul  ?  that,  as  we  try  all  trades,  so  has  he  tried 
all  cultures  ?  and  above  all,  that  his  mysticism 
gives  us  a  counterpoise  to  our  super-practical 
ity? 

There  is  no  man  living  to  whom,  as  a  writer,   \ 
so  many  of  us  feel  and  thankfully  acknowledge      } 
so  great  an  indebtedness  for  ennobling  impulses,      j 
—  none  whom   so  many  cannot  abide.    What 
does  he  mean?    ask   these  last.    Where  is  his 
system  ?    What  is  the  use  of  it  all  ?    What  the 
deuse  have  we  to  do  with  Brahma  ?    I  do  not 
propose  to  write  an  essay  on  Emerson  at  this 
time.     I  will  only  say  that  one  may  find  gran 
deur  and  consolation  in  a  starlit  night  without 
caring  to    ask  what   it  means,   save  grandeur 
and   consolation ;    one    may    like    Montaigne, 


278        EMERSON    THE    LECTURER 

as  some  ten  generations  before  us  have  done, 
without  thinking  him  so  systematic  as  some 
more  eminently  tedious  (or  shall  we  say  tedi 
ously  eminent  ?)  authors ;  one  may  think  roses 
as  good  in  their  way  as  cabbages,  though  the 
latter  would  make  a  better  show  in  the  witness- 
box,  if  cross-examined  as  to  their  usefulness  ; 
and  as  for  Brahma,  why,  he  can  take  care  of 
himself,  and  won't  bite  us  at  any  rate. 
f"~  The  bother  with  Mr.  Emerson  is,  that, 
f  though  he  writes  in  prose,  he  is  essentially  a  poet. 
If  you  undertake  to  paraphrase  what  he  says, 
and  to  reduce  it  to  words  of  one  syllable  for 
infant  minds,  you  will  make  as  sad  work  of  it 
as  the  good  monk  with  his  analysis  of  Homer 
in  the  "  Epistolae  Obscurorum  Virorum."  We 
look  upon  him  as  one  of  the  few  men  of  genius 
whom  our  age  has  produced,  and  there  needs 
no  better  proof  of  it  than  his  masculine  faculty 
of  fecundating  other  minds.  Search  for  his 
eloquence  in  his  books  and  you  will  perchance 
miss  it,  but  meanwhile  you  will  find  that  it  has 
kindled  all  your  thoughts.  For  choice  and  pith 
of  language  he  belongs  to  a  better  age  than 
ours,  and  might  rub  shoulders  with  Fuller  and 
]  Browne,  —  though  he  does  use  that  abominable 
/  word  reliable.  His  eye  for  a  fine,  telling  phrase 
A,  that  will  carry  true  is  like  that  of  a  backwoods- 
Ynan  for  a  rifle;  and  he  will  dredge  you  up  1 
ihoice  word  from  the  mud  of  Cotton  Mather 


EMERSON    THE    LECTURER        279 

himself.  A  diction  at  once  so  rich  and  so  homely 
as  his  I  know  not  where  to  match  in  these  days 
of  writing  by  the  page  ;  it  is  like  homespun 
cloth-of-gold.  The  many  cannot  miss  his 
meaning,  and  only  the  few  can  find  it.  It  is 
the  open  secret  of  all  true  genius.  It  is  whole 
some  to  angle  in  those  profound  pools,  though 
one  be  rewarded  with  nothing  more  than  the 
leap  of  a  fish  that  flashes  his  freckled  side  in 
the  sun  and  as  suddenly  absconds  in  the  dark 
and  dreamy  waters  again.  There  is  keen  excite 
ment,  though  there  be  no  ponderable  acquisi 
tion.  If  we  carry  nothing  home  in  our  baskets, 
there  is  ample  gain  in  dilated  lungs  and  stimu 
lated  blood.  What  does  he  mean,  quotha?  He 
means  inspiring  hints,  a  divining-rod  to  your 
deeper  nature.  No  doubt,  Emerson,  like  all 
original  men,  has  his  peculiar  audience,  and  yet 
I  know  none  that  can  hold  a  promiscuous  crowd 
in  pleased  attention  so  long  as  he.  As  in  all 
original  men,  there  is  something  for  every  pal 
ate.  "  Would  you  know,"  says  Goethe,  "  thel 
ripest  cherries  ?  Ask  the  boys  and  the  black-X 

birds."  * 

The  announcement  that  such  a  pleasure  as 
a  new  course  of  lectures  by  him  is  coming,  to 
people  as  old  as  I  am,  is  something  like  those 
forebodings  of  spring  that  prepare  us  every  year 
for  a  familiar  novelty,  none  the  less  novel,  when 
it  arrives,  because  it  is  familiar.  We  know  per- 


z8o        EMERSON    THE    LECTURER 

fectly  well  what  we  are  to  expect  from  Mr. 
Emerson,  and  yet  what  he  says  always  pene 
trates  and  stirs  us,  as  is  apt  to  be  the  case  with 
genius,  in  a  very  unlooked-for  fashion.  Per 
haps  genius  is  one  of  the  few  things  which  we 
gladly  allow  to  repeat  itself, —  one  of  the  few 
that  multiply  rather  than  weaken  the  force  of 
their  impression  by  iteration  ?  Perhaps  some  of 
us  hear  more  than  the  mere  words,  are  moved 
by  something  deeper  than  the  thoughts  ?  If  it 
be  so,  we  are  quite  right,  for  it  is  thirty  years 
and  more  of  u  plain  living  and  high  thinking  " 
that  speak  to  us  in  this  altogether  unique  lay- 
preacher.  We  have  shared  in  the  beneficence 
of  this  varied  culture,  this  fearless  impartiality 
in  criticism  and  speculation,  this  masculine  sin 
cerity,  this  sweetness  of  nature  which  rather 
stimulates  than  cloys,  for  a  generation  long.  If 
ever  there  was  a  standing  testimonial  to  the 
cumulative  power  and  value  of  Character  (and 
we  need  it  sadly  in  these  days),  we  have  it  in 
this  gracious  and  dignified  presence.  What  an 
antiseptic  is  a  pure  life  !  At  sixty-five  (or  two 
years  beyond  his  grand  climacteric,  as  he  would 
prefer  to  call  it)  he  has  that  privilege  of  soul 
which  abolishes  the  calendar,  and  presents  him 
to  us  always  the  unwasted  contemporary  of 
his  own  prime.  I  do  not  know  if  he  seem  old 
to  his  younger  hearers,  but  we  who  have  known 
him  so  long  wonder  at  the  tenacity  with  which 


EMERSON   THE   LECTURER        281 

he  maintains  himself  even  in  the  outposts  of 
youth.  I  suppose  it  is  not  the  Emerson  of 
1868  to  whom  we  listen.  For  us  the  whole  life 
of  the  man  is  distilled  in  the  clear  drop  of  every 
sentence,  and  behind  each  word  we  divine  the 
force  of  a  noble  character,  the  weight  of  a  large 
capital  of  thinking  and  being.  We  do  not  go 
to  hear  what  Emerson  says  so  much  as  to  hear 
Emerson.  Not  that  we  perceive  any  falling- 
off  in  anything  that  ever  was  essential  to  the 
charm  of  Mr.  Emerson's  peculiar  style  of 
thought  or  phrase.  The  first  lecture,  to  be  sure, 
was  more  disjointed  even  than  common.  It  was 
as  if,  after  vainly  trying  to  get  his  paragraphs 
into  sequence  and  order,  he  had  at  last  tried 
the  desperate  expedient  of  shuffling  them.  It 
was  chaos  come  again,  but  it  was  a  chaos  full 
of  shooting-stars,  a  jumble  of  creative  forces. 
The  second  lecture,  on  "Criticism  and  Poetry," 
was  quite  up  to  the  level  of  old  times,  full 
of  that  power  of  strangely  subtle  association 
whose  indirect  approaches  startle  the  mind  into 
almost  painful  attention,  of  those  flashes  of  mu 
tual  understanding  between  speaker  and  hearer 
that  are  gone  ere  one  can  say  it  lightens. 
The  vice  of  Emerson's  criticism  seems  to  be, 
that  while  no  man  is  so  sensitive  to  what  is  poet 
ical,  few  men  are  less  sensible  than  he  of  what 
makes  a  poem.  He  values  the  solid  meaning 
of  thought  above  the  subtler  meaning  of  style. 


i8i         EMERSON   THE    LECTURER 

He  would  prefer  Donne,  I  suspect,  to  Spen 
ser,  and  sometimes  mistakes  the  queer  for  the 
original. 

To  be  young  is  surely  the  best,  if  the  most 
precarious,  gift  of  life  ;  yet  there  are  some  of  us 
who  would  hardly  consent  to  be  young  again, 
if  it  were  at  the  cost  of  our  recollection  of 
Mr.  Emerson's  first  lectures  during  the  con 
sulate  of  Van  Buren.  We  used  to  walk  in 
from  the  country  to  the  Masonic  Temple  (I  think 
it  was),  through  the  crisp  winter  night,  and 
listen  to  that  thrilling  voice  of  his,  so  charged 
with  subtle  meaning  and  subtle  music,  as  ship 
wrecked  men  on  a  raft  to  the  hail  of  a  ship  that 
came  with  unhoped-for  food  and  rescue.  Cynics 
might  say  what  they  liked.  Did  our  own  im 
aginations  transfigure  dry  remainder-biscuit  into 
ambrosia  ?  At  any  rate,  he  brought  us  ///>, 
which,  on  the  whole,  is  no  bad  thing.  Was  it 
all  transcendentalism  ?  magic-lantern  pictures 
on  mist  ?  As  you  will.  Those,  then,  were  just 
what  we  wanted.  But  it  was  not  so.  The 
delight  and  the  benefit  were  that  he  put  us  in 
communication  with  a  larger  style  of  thought, 
sharpened  our  wits  with  a  more  pungent  phrase, 
gave  us  ravishing  glimpses  of  an  ideal  under 
the  dry  husk  of  our  New  England;  made  us 
conscious  of  the  supreme  and  everlasting  origi 
nality  of  whatever  bit  of  soul  might  be  in  any 
of  us ;  freed  us,  in  short,  from  the  stocks  of 


EMERSON    THE    LECTURER         283 

prose  in  which  we  had  sat  so  long  that  we 
had  grown  well-nigh  contented  in  our  cramps. 
And  who  that  saw  the  audience  will  ever  forget 
it,  where  every  one  still  capable  of  fire,  or  long 
ing  to  renew  in  himself  the  half-forgotten  sense 
of  it,  was  gathered  ?  Those  faces,  young  and 
old,  agleam  with  pale  intellectual  light,  eager 
with  pleased  attention,  flash  upon  me  once 
more  from  the  deep  recesses  of  the  years  with 
an  exquisite  pathos.  Ah,  beautiful  young  eyes, 
brimming  with  love  and  hope,  wholly  vanished 
now  in  that  other  world  we  call  the  Past,  or 
peering  doubtfully  through  the  pensive  gloam 
ing  of  memory,  your  light  impoverishes  these 
cheaper  days  !  I  hear  again  that  rustle  of  sen 
sation,  as  they  turned  to  exchange  glances  over 
some  pithier  thought,  some  keener  flash  of  that 
humor  which  always  played  about  the  horizon 
of  his  mind  like  heat-lightning,  and  it  seems 
now  like  the  sad  whisper  of  the  autumn  leaves 
that  are  whirling  around  me.  But  would  my 
picture  be  complete  if  I  forgot  that  ample  and 

vegete  countenance  of  Mr.  R of  W , 

—  how,  from  its  regular  post  at  the  corner  of 
the  front  bench,  it  turned  in  ruddy  triumph  to 
the  profaner  audience  as  if  he  were  the  inex 
plicably  appointed  fugleman  of  appreciation  ? 
I  was  reminded  of  him  by  those  hearty  cherubs 
in  Titian's  Assumption  that  look  at  you  as 
who  should  say,  "Did you  ever  see  a  Madonna 


284        EMERSON    THE    LECTURER 

like  that?  Did  you  ever  behold  one  hundred 
and  fifty  pounds  of  womanhood  mount  heaven 
ward  before  like  a  rocket?" 

To  some  of  us  that  long-past  experience 
remains  as  the  most  marvellous  and  fruitful  we 
have  ever  had.  Emerson  awakened  us,  saved 
us  from  the  body  of  this  death.  It  is  the  sound 
of  the  trumpet  that  the  young  soul  longs  for, 
careless  what  breath  may  fill  it.  Sidney  heard 
it  in  the  ballad  of  "  Chevy  Chase,"  and  we  in 
Emerson.  Nor  did  it  blow  retreat,  but  called 
to  us  with  assurance  of  victory.  Did  they  say 
he  was  disconnected  ?  So  were  the  stars,  that 
seemed  larger  to  our  eyes,  still  keen  with  that 
excitement,  as  we  walked  homeward  with 
prouder  stride  over  the  creaking  snow.  And 
were  they  not  knit  together  by  a  higher  logic 
than  our  mere  sense  could  master?  Were  we 
enthusiasts  ?  I  hope  and  believe  we  were,  and 
am  thankful  to  the  man  who  made  us  worth 
something  for  once  in  our  lives.  If  asked  what 
was  left  ?  what  we  carried  home  ?  we  should  not 
have  been  careful  for  an  answer.  It  would  have 
been  enough  if  we  had  said  that  something 
beautiful  had  passed  that  way.  Or  we  might 
have  asked  in  return  what  one  brought  away 
from  a  symphony  of  Beethoven  ?  Enough  that 
he  had  set  that  ferment  of  wholesome  discontent 
at  work  in  us.  There  is  one,  at  least,  of  those 
old  hearers,  so  many  of  whom  are  now  in  the 


EMERSON    THE   LECTURER         285 

fruition  of  that  intellectual  beauty  of  which 
Emerson  gave  them  both  the  desire  and  the 
foretaste,  who  will  always  love  to  repeat :  — 

"  Che  in  la  mente  m*  e  fitta,  ed  or  m*  accuora 
La  cara  e  buona  immagine  paterna 
Di  voi,  quando  nel  mondo  ad  ora  ad  ora 
M*  insegnavaste  come  1'  uom  s*  eterna." 

I  am  unconsciously  thinking,  as  I  write,  of 
the  third  lecture  of  the  present  course,  in  which 
Mr.  Emerson  gave  some  delightful  reminis 
cences  of  the  intellectual  influences  in  whose 
movement  he  had  shared.  It  was  like  hearing 
Goethe  read  some  passages  of  the  "  Wahrheit 
aus  seinem  Leben."  Not  that  there  was  not  a 
little  Dichtung,  too,  here  and  there,  as  the  lec 
turer  built  up  so  lofty  a  pedestal  under  certain 
figures  as  to  lift  them  into  a  prominence  of 
obscurity,  and  seem  to  masthead  them  there. 
Everybody  was  asking  his  neighbor  who  this 
or  that  recondite  great  man  was,  in  the  faint 
hope  that  somebody  might  once  have  heard  of 
him.  There  are  those  who  call  Mr.  Emerson 
cold.  Let  them  revise  their  judgment  in  pre 
sence  of  this  loyalty  of  his  that  can  keep  warm 
for  half  a  century,  that  never  forgets  a  friend 
ship,  or  fails  to  pay  even  a  fancied  obligation  to 
the  uttermost  farthing.  This  substantiation  of 
shadows  was  but  incidental,  and  pleasantly 
characteristic  of  the  man  to  those  who  know 
and  love  him.  The  greater  part  of  the  lecture 


286         EMERSON    THE    LECTURER 

was  devoted  to  reminiscences  of  things  substan 
tial  in  themselves.  He  spoke  of  Everett,  fresh 
from  Greece  and  Germany  ;  of  Channing  ;  of 
the  translations  of  Margaret  Fuller,  Ripley, 
and  Dwight ;  of  the  "  Dial  "  and  Brook  Farm. 
To  what  he  said  of  the  latter  an  undertone  of 
good-humored  irony  gave  special  zest.  But 
what  every  one  of  his  hearers  felt  was  that  the 
protagonist  in  the  drama  was  left  out.  The  lec 
turer  was  no  ^Eneas  to  babble  the  quorum  magna 
•pars  fuiy  and,  as  one  of  his  listeners,  I  cannot 
help  wishing  to  say  how  each  of  them  was  com 
menting  the  story  as  it  went  along,  and  filling 
up  the  necessary  gaps  in  it  from  his  own  private 
store  of  memories.  His  younger  hearers  could 
not  know  how  much  they  owed  to  the  benign 
impersonality,  the  quiet  scorn  of  everything 
ignoble,  the  never-sated  hunger  of  self-culture, 
that  were  personified  in  the  man  before  them. 
But  the  older  knew  how  much  the  country's  in 
tellectual  emancipation  was  due  to  the  stimulus 
of  his  teaching  and  example,  how  constantly  he 
had  kept  burning  the  beacon  of  an  ideal  life 
above  our  lower  region  of  turmoil.  To  him 
more  than  to  all  other  causes  together  did  the 
young  martyrs  of  our  civil  war  owe  the  sustain 
ing  strength  of  thoughtful  heroism  that  is  so 
touching  in  every  record  of  their  lives.  Those 
who  are  grateful  to  Mr.  Emerson,  as  many  of 
us  are,  for  what  they  feel  to  be  most  valuable 


EMERSON    THE    LECTURER         287 

in  their  culture,  or  perhaps  I  should  say  their 
impulse,  are  grateful  not  so  much  for  any  direct 
teachings  of  his  as  for  that  inspiring  lift  which 
only  genius  can  give,  and  without  which  all  doc 
trine  is  chaff. 

This  was  something  like  the  caret  which  some 
of  us  older  boys  wished  to  fill  up  on  the  margin 
of  the  master's  lecture.  Few  men  have  been  so 
much  to  so  many,  and  through  so  large  a  range 
of  aptitudes  and  temperaments,  and  this  simply 
because  all  of  us  value  manhood  beyond  any  or 
all  other  qualities  of  character.  We  may  sus 
pect  in  him,  here  and  there,  a  certain  thinness 
and  vagueness  of  quality,  but  let  the  waters  go 
over  him  as  they  list,  this  masculine  fibre  of  his 
will  keep  its  lively  color  and  its  toughness  of 
texture.  I  have  heard  some  great  speakers  and 
some  accomplished  orators,  but  never  any  that 
so  moved  and  persuaded  men  as  he.  There  is 
a  kind  of  undertow  in  that  rich  baritone  of  his 
that  sweeps  our  minds  from  their  foothold  into 
deeper  waters  with  a  drift  we  cannot  and  would 
not  resist.  And  how  artfully  (for  Emerson  is 
a  long-studied  artist  in  these  things)  does  the 
deliberate  utterance,  that  seems  waiting  for 
the  fit  word,  appear  to  admit  us  partners  in  the 
labor  of  thought  and  make  us  feel  as  if  the 
glance  of  humor  were  a  sudden  suggestion,  as 
if  the  perfect  phrase  lying  written  there  on  the 
desk  were  as  unexpected  to  him  as  to  us  !  In 


288        EMERSON   THE   LECTURER 

that  closely  filed  speech  of  his  at  the  Burns 
centenary  dinner,  every  word  seemed  to  have 
just  dropped  down  to  him  from  the  clouds. 
He  looked  far  away  over  the  heads  of  his 
hearers,  with  a  vague  kind  of  expectation,  as 
into  some  private  heaven  of  invention,  and  the 
winged  period  came  at  last  obedient  to  his  spell. 
"  My  dainty  Ariel !  "  he  seemed  murmuring  to 
himself  as  he  cast  down  his  eyes  as  if  in  depre 
cation  of  the  frenzy  of  approval  and  caught 
another  sentence  from  the  Sibylline  leaves  that 
lay  before  him,  ambushed  behind  a  dish  of  fruit 
and  seen  only  by  nearest  neighbors.  Every 
sentence  brought  down  the  house,  as  I  never 
saw  one  brought  down  before,  —  and  it  is  not 
so  easy  to  hit  Scotsmen  with  a  sentiment  that 
has  no  hint  of  native  brogue  in  it.  I  watched, 
for  it  was  an  interesting  study,  how  the  quick 
sympathy  ran  flashing  from  face  to  face  down 
the  long  tables,  like  an  electric  spark  thrilling 
as  it  went,  and  then  exploded  in  a  thunder  of 
plaudits.  I  watched  till  tables  and  faces  van 
ished,  for  I,  too,  found  myself  caught  up  in 
the  common  enthusiasm,  and  my  excited  fancy 
set  me  under  the  bema  listening  to  him  who 
fulmined  over  Greece.  I  can  never  help  apply 
ing  to  him  what  Ben  Jonson  said  of  Bacon: 
"  There  happened  in  my  time  one  noble 
speaker,  who  was  full  of  gravity  in  his  speak 
ing.  His  language  was  nobly  censorious.  No 


EMERSON    THE    LECTURER         289 

man  ever  spake  more  neatly,  more  pressly, 
more  weightily,  or  suffered  less  emptiness,  less 
idleness,  in  what  he  uttered.  No  member  of 
his  speech  but  consisted  of  his  own  graces.  His 
hearers  could  not  cough,  or  look  aside  from 
him,  without  loss.  He  commanded  where  he 
spoke."  Those  who  heard  him  while  their  na 
tures  were  yet  plastic,  and  their  mental  nerves 
trembled  under  the  slightest  breath  of  divine 
air,  will  never  cease  to  feel  and  say :  — 

«« Was  never  eye  did  see  that  face, 

Was  never  ear  did  hear  that  tongue, 
Was  never  mind  did  mind  his  grace, 
That  ever  thought  the  travail  long; 
But  eyes,  and  ears,  and  every  thought, 
Were  with  his  sweet  perfections  caught." 


THOREAU 

1865 

WHAT  contemporary,  if  he  was  in  the 
fighting  period  of  his  life  (since  Na 
ture  sets  limits  about  her  conscription 
for  spiritual  fields,  as  the  state  does  in  physical 
warfare),  will  ever  forget  what  was  somewhat 
vaguely  called  the  "  Transcendental  Move 
ment  "  of  thirty  years  ago  ?  Apparently  set  astir 
by  Carlyle's  essays  on  the  Signs  of  the  Times, 
and  on  History,  the  final  and  more  immediate 
impulse  seemed  to  be  given  by  "  Sartor  Resar- 
^tus."  At  least  the  republication  in  Boston  of 
that  wonderful  Abraham  a  Sancta  Clara  sermon 
on  FalstafFs  text  of  the  miserable  forked  radish 
gave  the  signal  for  a  sudden  mental  and  moral 
mutiny.  Ecce  nunc  tempus  acceptable !  was 
shouted  on  all  hands  with  every  variety  of  em 
phasis,  and  by  voices  of  every  conceivable  pitch, 
representing  the  three  sexes  of  men,  women, 
and  Lady  Mary  Wortley  Montagues.  The 
nameless  eagle  of  the  tree  Ygdrasil  was  about 
to  sit  at  last,  and  wild-eyed  enthusiasts  rushed 
from  all  sides,  each  eager  to  thrust  under  the 
mystic  bird  that  chalk  egg  from  which  the  new 


THOREAU  291 

and  fairer  Creation  was  to  be  hatched  in  due 
time.  Redeunt  Saturnia  regna^ — so  far  was  cer 
tain,  though  in  what  shape,  or  by  what  methods, 
was  still  a  matter  of  debate.  Every  possible  form 
of  intellectual  and  physical  dyspepsia  brought 
forth  its  gospel.  Bran  had  its  prophets,  and  the 
presartorial  simplicity  of  Adam  its  martyrs,  tail 
ored  impromptu  from  the  tar-pot  by  incensed 
neighbors,  and  sent  forth  to  illustrate  the  "  feath 
ered  Mercury/'  as  defined  by  Webster  and 
Worcester.  Plainness  of  speech  was  carried  to 
a  pitch  that  would  have  taken  away  the  breath 
of  George  Fox ;  and  even  swearing  had  its  evan 
gelists,  who  answered  a  simple  inquiry  after  their 
health  with  an  elaborate  ingenuity  of  imprecation 
that  might  have  been  honorably  mentioned  by 
Marlborough  in  general  orders.  Everybody  had 
a  mission  (with  a  capital  M)  to  attend  to  every 
body  else's  business.  No  brain  but  had  its  pri 
vate  maggot,  which  must  have  found  pitiably 
short  commons  sometimes.  Not  a  few  impecu 
nious  zealots  abjured  the  use  of  money  (unless 
earned  by  other  people),  professing  to  live  on 
the  internal  revenues  of  the  spirit.  Some  had 
an  assurance  of  instant  millennium  so  soon  as 
hooks  and  eyes  should  be  substituted  forbuttons. 
Communities  were  established  where  everything 
was  to  be  common  but  common  sense.  Men 
renounced  their  old  gods,  and  hesitated  only 
whether  to  bestow  their  furloughed  allegiance 


292  THOREAU 

on  Thor  or  Budh.  Conventions  were  held  for 
every  hitherto  inconceivable  purpose.  The  be 
lated  gift  of  tongues,  as  among  the  Fifth  Mon 
archy  men,  spread  like  a  contagion,  rendering  its 
victims  incomprehensible  to  all  Christian  men; 
whether  equally  so  to  the  most  distant  possible 
heathen  or  not  was  unexperimented,  though 
many  would  have  subscribed  liberally  that  a  fair 
trial  might  be  made.  It  was  the  pentecost  of 
Shinar.  The  day  of  utterances  reproduced  the 
day  of  rebuses  and  anagrams,  and  there  was 
nothing  so  simple  that  uncial  letters  and  the 
style  of  Diphilus  the  Labyrinth  could  not  turn 
it  into  a  riddle.  Many  foreign  revolutionists  out 
of  work  added  to  the  general  misunderstanding 
their  contribution  of  broken  English  in  every 
most  ingenious  form  of  fracture.  All  stood  ready 
at  a  moment's  notice  to  reform  everything  but 
themselves.  The  general  motto  was  :  — 

"And  we'll  talk  with  them,  too, 
And  take  upon  's  the  mystery  of  things 
As  if  we  were  God's  spies." 

Nature  is  always  kind  enough  to  give  even 
her  clouds  a  humorous  lining.  I  have  barely 
hinted  at  the  comic  side  of  the  affair,  for  the 
material  was  endless.  This  was  the  whistle  and 
trailing  fuse  of  the  shell,  but  there  was  a  very 
solid  and  serious  kernel,  full  of  the  most  deadly 
explosiveness.  Thoughtful  men  divined  it,  but 
the  generality  suspected  nothing.  The  word 


THOREAU  293 

"  transcendental  "  then  was  the  maid  of  all  work 
for  those  who  could  not  think,  as  "  Pre-Raph 
aelite  "  has  been  more  recently  for  people  of  the 
same  limited  housekeeping.  The  truth  is,  that 
there  was  a  much  nearer  metaphysical  relation 
and  a  much  more  distant  aesthetic  and  literary 
relation  between  Carlyle  and  the  Apostles  of  the 
Newness,  as  they  were  called  in  New  England, 
than  has  commonly  been  supposed.  Both  repre 
sented  the  reaction  and  revolt  against  Philis- 
terei,  a  renewal  of  the  old  battle  begun  in  modern 
times  by  Erasmus  and  Reuchlin,  and  continued 
by  Lessing,  Goethe,  and,  in  a  far  narrower  sense, 
by  Heine  in  Germany,  and  of  which  Fielding, 
Sterne,  and  Wordsworth  in  different  ways  have 
been  the  leaders  in  England.  It  was  simply  a 
struggle  for  fresh  air,  in  which,  if  the  windows 
could  not  be  opened,  there  was  danger  that  panes 
would  be  broken,  though  painted  with  images 
of  saints  and  martyrs.  Light,  colored  by  these 
reverend  effigies,  was  none  the  more  respirable 
for  being  picturesque.  There  is  only  one  thing 
better  than  tradition,  and  that  is  the  original 
and  eternal  life  out  of  which  all  tradition  takes 
its  rise.  It  was  this  life  which  the  reformers 
demanded,  with  more  or  less  clearness  of  con 
sciousness  and  expression,  life  in  politics,  life  in 
literature,  life  in  religion.  Of  what  use  to  im 
port  a  gospel  from  Judsea,  if  we  leave  behind  the 
soul  that  made  it  possible,  the  God  who  keeps 


294  THOREAU 

it  forever  real  and  present  ?  Surely  Abana  and 
Pharpar  are  better  than  Jordan,  if  a  living 
faith  be  mixed  with  those  waters  and  none  with 
these. 

Scotch  Presbyterianism  as  a  motive  of  spirit 
ual  progress  was  dead ;  New  England  Puritan 
ism  was  in  like  manner  dead;  in  other  words, 
Protestantism  had  made  its  fortune  and  no 
longer  protested  ;  but  till  Carlyle  spoke  out  in 
the  Old  World  and  Emerson  in  the  New,  no 
one  had  dared  to  proclaim,  Le  rot  est  mort : 
vive  le  roil  The  meaning  of  which  proclama 
tion  was  essentially  this  :  the  vital  spirit  has  long 
since  departed  out  of  this  form  once  so  kingly, 
and  the  great  seal  has  been  in  commission  long 
enough  ;  but  meanwhile  the  soul  of  man,  from 
which  all  power  emanates  and  to  which  it  reverts, 
still  survives  in  undiminished  royalty  ;  God  still 
survives,  little  as  you  gentlemen  of  the  Commis 
sion  seem  to  be  aware  of  it,  —  nay,  will  possibly 
outlive  the  whole  of  you,  incredible  as  it  may 
appear.  The  truth  is,  that  both  Scotch  Presby 
terianism  and  New  England  Puritanism  made 
their  new  avatar  in  Carlyle  and  Emerson,  the 
heralds  of  their  formal  decease,  and  the  tend 
ency  of  the  one  toward  Authority  and  of  the 
other  toward  Independency  might  have  been 
prophesied  by  whoever  had  studied  history.  The 
necessity  was  not  so  much  in  the  men  as  in  the 
principles  they  represented  and  the  traditions 


THOREAU  295 

which  overruled  them.  The  Puritanism  of  the 
past  found  its  unwilling  poet  in  Hawthorne}  the 
rarest  creative  imagination  of  the  century,  the 
rarest  in  some  ideal  respects  since  Shakespeare ; 
but  the  Puritanism  that  cannot  die,  the  Puritan 
ism  that  made  New  England  what  it  is,  and  is 
destined  to  make  America  what  it  should  be, 
found  its  voice  in  Emerson.  Though  holding 
himself  aloof  from  all  active  partnership  in 
movements  of  reform,  he  has  been  the  sleeping 
partner  who  has  supplied  a  great  part  of  their 
capital. 

The  artistic  range  of  Emerson  is  narrow,  as 
every  well-read  critic  must  feel  at  once ;  and 
so  is  that  of  .^Eschylus,  so  is  that  of  Dante,  so 
is  that  of  Montaigne,  so  is  that  of  Schiller,  so  is 
that  of  nearly  every  one  except  Shakespeare ; 
but  there  is  a  gauge  of  height  no  less  than  of 
breadth,  of  individuality  as  well  as  of  compre 
hensiveness,  and,  above  all,  there  is  the  stand 
ard  of  genetic  power,  the  test  of  the  masculine 
as  distinguished  from  the  receptive  minds.  There 
are  staminate  plants  in  literature  that  make  no 
fine  show  of  fruit,  but  without  whose  pollen, 
quintessence  of  fructifying  gold,  the  garden  had 
been  barren.  Emerson's  mind  is  emphatically 
one  of  these,  and  there  is  no  man  to  whom  our 
aesthetic  culture  owes  so  much.  The  Puritan 
revolt  had  made  us  ecclesiastically  and  the 
Revolution  politically  independent,  but  we  were 


296  THOREAU 

still  socially  and  intellectually  moored  to  Eng 
lish  thought,  till  Emerson  cut  the  cable  and 
gave  us  a  chance  at  the  dangers  and  the  glories  of 
blue  water.  No  man  young  enough  to  have  felt 
it  can  forget  or  cease  to  be  grateful  for  the  men 
tal  and  moral  nudge  which  he  received  from  the 
writings  of  his  high-minded  and  brave-spirited 
countryman.  That  we  agree  with  him,  or  that 
he  always  agrees  with  himself,  is  aside  from  the 
question;  but  that  he  arouses  in  us  something 
that  we  are  the  better  for  having  awakened, 
whether  that  something  be  of  opposition  or  as 
sent,  that  he  speaks  always  to  what  is  highest 
and  least  selfish  in  us,  few  Americans  of  the 
generation  younger  than  his  own  would  be  dis 
posed  to  deny.  His  oration  before  the  Phi  Beta 
Kappa  Society  at  Cambridge,  some  thirty  years 
ago,  was  an  event  without  any  former  parallel 
in  our  literary  annals,  a  scene  to  be  always  trea 
sured  in  the  memory  for  its  picturesqueness  and 
its  inspiration.  What  crowded  and  breathless 
aisles,what  windows  clustering  with  eager  heads, 
what  enthusiasm  of  approval,  what  grim  silence 
of  foregone  dissent !  It  was  our  Yankee  version 
of  a  lecture  by  Abelard,our  Harvard  parallel  to 
the  last  public  appearances  of  Schelling. 

I  said  that  the  Transcendental  Movement 
was  the  protestant  spirit  of  Puritanism  seeking  a 
new  outlet  and  an  escape  from  forms  and  creeds 
which  compressed  rather  than  expressed  it.  In 


THOREAU  297 

its  motives,  its  preaching,  and  its  results,  it  dif 
fered  radically  from  the  doctrine  of  Carlyle.  The 
Scotchman,  with  all  his  genius,  and  his  humor 
gigantesque  as  that  of  Rabelais,  has  grown 
shriller  and  shriller  with  years,  degenerating 
sometimes  into  a  common  scold,  and  emptying 
very  unsavory  vials  of  wrath  on  the  head  of 
the  sturdy  British  Socrates  of  worldly  common 
sense.  The  teaching  of  Emerson  tended  much 
more  exclusively  to  self-culture  and  the  inde-- 
pendent  development  of  the  individual  man. 
It  seemed  to  many  almost  Pythagorean  in  its 
voluntary  seclusion  from  commonwealth  affairs. 
Both  Carlyle  and  Emerson  were  disciples  of 
Goethe,  but  Emerson  in  a  far  truer  sense ;  and 
while  the  one,  from  his  bias  toward  the  eccentric, 
has  degenerated  more  and  more  into  mannerism, 
the  other  has  clarified  steadily  toward  perfection 
of  style,  —  exquisite  fineness  of  material,  unob 
trusive  lowness  of  tone  and  simplicity  of  fashion, 
the  most  high-bred  garb  of  expression.  What 
ever  may  be  said  of  his  thought,  nothing  can  be 
finer  than  the  delicious  limpidness  of  his  phrase. 
If  it  was  ever  questionable  whether  democracy 
could  develop  a  gentleman,  the  problem  has  been 
affirmatively  solved  at  last.  Carlyle,  in  his  cyni 
cism  and  his  admiration  offeree  in  and  for  itself, 
has  become  at  last  positively  inhuman  ;  Emer 
son,  reverencing  strength,  seeking  the  highest 
outcome  of  the  individual,  has  found  that  society 


298  THOREAU 

and  politics  are  also  main  elements  in  the  attain 
ment  of  the  desired  end,  and  has  drawn  steadily 
manward  and  worldward.  The  two  men  repre 
sent  respectively  those  grand  personifications 
in  the  drama  of  ^Eschylus,  Bta  and  Kpctros. 

Among  the  pistillate  plants  kindled  to  fruitage 
by  the  Emersonian  pollen,  Thoreau  is  thus  far 
the  most  remarkable  ;  and  it  is  something  emi 
nently  fitting  that  his  posthumous  works  should 
be  offered  us  by  Emerson,  for  they  are  straw 
berries  from  his  own  garden.  A  singular  mixture 
of  varieties,  indeed,  there  is  ;  —  alpine,  some  of 
them,  with  the  flavor  of  rare  mountain  air;  others 
wood,  tasting  of  sunny  roadside  banks  or  shy 
openings  in  the  forest;  and  not  a  few  seedlings 
swollen  hugely  by  culture,  but  lacking  the  fine 
natural  aroma  of  the  more  modest  kinds.  Strange 
books  these  are  of  his,  and  interesting  in  many 
ways,  —  instructive  chiefly  as  showing  how  con 
siderable  a  crop  may  be  raised  on  a  compara 
tively  narrow  close  of  mind,  and  how  much  a 
man  may  make  of  his  life  if  he  will  assiduously 
follow  it,  though  perhaps  never  truly  finding  it 
at  last. 

I  have  just  been  renewing  my  recollection  of 
Mr.  Thoreau's  writings,  and  have  read  through 
his  six  volumes  in  the  order  of  their  production. 
I  shall  try  to  give  an  adequate  report  of  their 
impression  upon  me  both  as  critic  and  as  mere 
reader.  He  seems  to  me  to  have  been  a  man 


THOREAU  299 

with  so  high  a  conceit  of  himself  that  he  accepted 
without  questioning,  and  insisted  on  our  accept 
ing,  his  defects  and  weaknesses  of  character  as 
virtues  and  powers  peculiar  to  himself.  Was  he 
indolent,  he  finds  none  of  the  activities  which 
attract  or  employ  the  rest  of  mankind  worthy 
of  him.  Was  he  wanting  in  the  qualities  that 
make  success,  it  is  success  that  is  contemptible, 
and  not  himself  that  lacks  persistency  and  pur 
pose.  Was  he  poor,  money  was  an  unmixed 
evil.  Did  his  life  seem  a  selfish  one,  he  con 
demns  doing  good  as  one  of  the  weakest  of 
superstitions.  To  be  of  use  was  with  him  the 
most  killing  bait  of  the  wily  tempter  Useless- 
ness.  He  had  no  faculty  of  generalization  from 
outside  of  himself,  or  at  least  no  experience 
which  would  supply  the  material  of  such,  and 
he  makes  his  own  whim  the  law,  his  own  range 
the  horizon  of  the  universe.  He  condemns  a 
world,  the  hollowness  of  whose  satisfactions 
he  had  never  had  the  means  of  testing,  and 
we  recognize  Apemantus  behind  the  mask  of 
Timon.  He  had  little  active  imagination  ;  of 
the  receptive  he  had  much.  His  appreciation  is 
of  the  highest  quality  ;  his  critical  power,  from 
want  of  continuity  of  mind,  very  limited  and 
inadequate.  He  somewhere  cites  a  simile  from 
Ossian,  as  an  example  of  the  superiority  of 
the  old  poetry  to  the  new,  though,  even  were 
the  historic  evidence  less  convincing,  the  senti- 


3CO  THOREAU 

mental  melancholy  of  those  poems  should  be 
conclusive  of  their  modernness.  He  had  none 
of  the  artistic  mastery  which  controls  a  great 
work  to  the  serene  balance  of  completeness,  but 
exquisite  mechanical  skill  in  the  shaping  of  sen 
tences  and  paragraphs,  or  (more  rarely)  short 
bits  of  verse  for  the  expression  of  a  detached 
thought,  sentiment,  or  image.  His  works  give 
one  the  feeling  of  a  sky  full  of  stars,  —  some 
thing  impressive  and  exhilarating  certainly, 
something  high  overhead  and  freckled  thickly 
with  spots  of  isolated  brightness ;  but  whether 
these  have  any  mutual  relation  with  each  other, 
or  have  any  concern  with  our  mundane  matters, 
is  for  the  most  part  matter  of  conjecture,  —  as 
trology  as  yet,  and  not  astronomy. 

It  is  curious,  considering  what  Thoreau  after 
wards  became,  that  he  was  not  by  nature  an 
observer.  He  only  saw  the  things  he  looked 
for,  and  was  less  poet  than  naturalist.  Till  he 
built  his  Walden  shanty,  he  did  not  know  that 
the  hickory  grew  in  Concord.  Till  he  went  to 
Maine,  he  had  never  seen  phosphorescent  wood, 
a  phenomenon  early  familiar  to  most  country 
boys.  At  forty  he  speaks  of  the  seeding  of 
the  pine  as  a  new  discovery,  though  one  should 
have  thought  that  its  gold-dust  of  blowing 
pollen  might  have  earlier  drawn  his  eye.  Nei 
ther  his  attention  nor  his  genius  was  of  the 
spontaneous  kind.  He  discovered  nothing. 


THOREAU  3oi 

He  thought  everything  a  discovery  cf  his  own, 
from  moonlight  to  the  planting  of  acorns  and 
nuts  by  squirrels.  This  is  a  defect  in  his  char 
acter,  but  one  of  his  chief  charms  as  a  writer. 
Everything  grows  fresh  under  his  hand.  He 
delved  in  his  mind  and  nature ;  he  planted 
them  with  all  manner  of  native  and  foreign 
seeds,  and  reaped  assiduously.  He  was  not 
merely  solitary,  he  would  be  isolated,  and  suc 
ceeded  at  last  in  almost  persuading  himself  that 
he  was  autochthonous.  He  valued  everything 
in  proportion  as  he  fancied  it  to  be  exclusively 
his  own.  He  complains  in  "  Walden "  that 
there  is  no  one  in  Concord  with  whom  he  could 
talk  of  Oriental  literature,  though  the  man 
was  living  within  two  miles  of  his  hut  who 
had  introduced  him  to  it.  This  intellectual 
selfishness  becomes  sometimes  almost  painful 
in  reading  him.  He  lacked  that  generosity  of 
"  communication  "  which  Johnson  admired  in 
Burke.  De  Quincey  tells  us  that  Wordsworth 
was  impatient  when  any  one  else  spoke  of 
mountains,  as  if  he  had  a  peculiar  property 
in  them.  And  we  can  readily  understand  why  it 
should  be  so :  no  one  is  satisfied  with  another's 
appreciation  of  his  mistress.  But  Thoreau 
seems  to  have  prized  a  lofty  way  of  thinking 
(often  we  should  be  inclined  to  call  it  a  remote 
one)  not  so  much  because  it  was  good  in  itself 
as  because  he  wished  few  to  share  it  with 


302  THOREAU 

him.  It  seems  now  and  then  as  if  he  did  not 
seek  to  lure  others  up  "above  our  lower  region 
of  turmoil,"  but  to  leave  his  own  name  cut  on 
the  mountain  peak  as  the  first  climber.  This 
itch  of  originality  infects  his  thought  and  style. 
To  be  misty  is  not  to  be  mystic.  He  turns 
commonplaces  end  for  end,  and  fancies  it  makes 
something  new  of  them.  As  we  walk  down 
Park  Street,  our  eye  is  caught  by  Dr.  Winship's 
dumb-bells,  one  of  which  bears  an  inscription 
testifying  that  it  is  the  heaviest  ever  put  up  at 
arm's  length  by  any  athlete  ;  and  in  reading 
Mr.  Thoreau's  books  we  cannot  help  feeling 
as  if  he  sometimes  invited  our  attention  to  a 
particular  sophism  or  paradox  as  the  biggest 
yet  maintained  by  any  single  writer.  He  seeks, 
at  all  risks,  for  perversity  of  thought,  and  re 
vives  the  age  of  concetti  while  he  fancies  himself 
going  back  to  a  pre-classical  nature.  "  A  day," 
he  says,  "  passed  in  the  society  of  those  Greek 
sages,  such  as  described  in  the  '  Banquet '  of 
Xenophon,  would  not  be  comparable  with  the 
dry  wit  of  decayed  cranberry-vines  and  the  fresh 
Attic  salt  of  the  moss-beds."  It  is  not  so  much 
the  True  that  he  loves  as  the  Out-of-the-Way. 
As  the  Brazen  Age  shows  itself  in  other  men  by 
exaggeration  of  phrase,  so  in  him  by  extrava 
gance  of  statement.  He  wishes  always  to  trump 
your  suit  and  to  n^when  you  least  expect  it. 
Do  you  love  Nature  because  she  is  beautiful  ? 


THOREAU  3o? 

He  will  find  a  better  argument  in  her  ugliness. 
Are  you  tired  of  the  artificial  man  ?  He  in 
stantly  dresses  you  up  an  ideal  in  a  Penobscot 
Indian,  and  attributes  to  this  creature  of  his 
otherwise-mindedness  as  peculiarities  things 
that  are  common  to  all  woodsmen,  white  or 
red,  and  this  simply  because  he  has  not  studied 
the  pale-faced  variety. 

This  notion  of  an  absolute  originality,  as 
if  one  could  have  a  patent-right  in  it,  is  an  ab 
surdity.  A  man  cannot  escape  in  thought,  any 
more  than  he  can  in  language,  from  the  past 
and  the  present.  As  no  one  ever  invents  a 
word,  and  yet  language  somehow  grows  by 
general  contribution  and  necessity,  so  it  is  with 
thought.  Mr.  Thoreau  seems  to  me  to  insist 
in  public  on  going  back  to  flint  and  steel,  when 
there  is  a  match-box  in  his  pocket  which  he 
knows  very  well  how  to  use  at  a  pinch.  Origi 
nality  consists  in  power  of  digesting  and  assimi 
lating  thoughts,  so  that  they  become  part  of 
our  life  and  substance.  Montaigne,  for  ex 
ample,  is  one  of  the  most  original  of  authors, 
though  he  helped  himself  to  ideas  in  every  di 
rection.  But  they  turn  to  blood  and  coloring 
in  his  style,  and  give  a  freshness  of  complexion 
that  is  forever  charming.  In  Thoreau  much 
seems  yet  to  be  foreign  and  unassimilated, 
showing  itself  in  symptoms  of  indigestion.  A 
preacher-up  of  Nature,  we  now  and  then  detect 


304  THOREAU 

under  the  surly  and  stoic  garb  something  of  the 
sophist  and  the  sentimentalizes  I  am  far  from 
implying  that  this  was  conscious  on  his  part. 
But  it  is  much  easier  for  a  man  to  impose  on 
himself  when  he  measures  only  with  himself.  A 
greater  familiarity  with  ordinary  men  would  have 
done  Thoreau  good,  by  showing  him  how  many 
fine  qualities  are  common  to  the  race.  The 
radical  vice  of  his  theory  of  life  was  that  he 
confounded  physical  with  spiritual  remoteness 
from  men.  A  man  is  far  enough  withdrawn 
from  his  fellows  if  he  keep  himself  clear  of  their 
weaknesses.  He  is  not  so  truly  withdrawn  as 
exiled,  if  he  refuse  to  share  in  their  strength. 
"  Solitude,"  says  Cowley,  "  can  be  well  fitted 
and  set  right  but  upon  a  very  few  persons. 
They  must  have  enough  knowledge  of  the 
world  to  see  the  vanity  of  it,  and  enough  virtue 
to  despise  all  vanity."  It  is  a  morbid  self-con 
sciousness  that  pronounces  the  world  of  men 
empty  and  worthless  before  trying  it,  the  in 
stinctive  evasion  of  one  who  is  sensible  of  some 
innate  weakness,  and  retorts  the  accusation  of 
it  before  any  has  made  it  but  himself.  To  a 
healthy  mind,  the  world  is  a  constant  chal 
lenge  of  opportunity.  Mr.  Thoreau  had  not  a 
healthy  mind,  or  he  would  not  have  been  so 
fond  of  prescribing.  His  whole  life  was  a 
search  for  the  doctor.  The  old  mystics  had  a 
wiser  sense  of  what  the  world  was  worth.  They 


THOREAU  305 

ordained  a  severe  apprenticeship  to  law,  and 
even  ceremonial,  in  order  to  the  gaining  of 
freedom  and  mastery  over  these.  Seven  years 
of  service  for  Rachel  were  to  be  rewarded  at 
last  with  Leah.  Seven  other  years  of  faithful 
ness  with  her  were  to  win  them  at  last  the  true 
bride  of  their  souls.  Active  Life  was  with  them 
the  only  path  to  the  Contemplative. 

Thoreau  had  no  humor,  and  this  implies  that 
he  was  a  sorry  logician.  Himself  an  artist  in 
rhetoric,  he  confounds  thought  with  style  when 
he  undertakes  to  speak  of  the  latter.  He  was 
forever  talking  of  getting  away  from  the  world, 
but  he  must  be  always  near  enough  to  it,  nay, 
to  the  Concord  corner  of  it,  to  feel  the  impres 
sion  he  makes  there.  He  verifies  the  shrewd 
remark  of  Sainte-Beuve,  "  On  touche  encore  a 
son  temps  et  tres-fort,  meme  quand  on  le  re 
pousse."  This  egotism  of  his  is  a  Stylites  pil 
lar  after  all,  a  seclusion  which  keeps  him  in  the 
public  eye.  The  dignity  of  man  is  an  excellent 
thing,  but  therefore  to  hold  one's  self  too  sacred 
and  precious  is  the  reverse  of  excellent.  There 
is  something  delightfully  absurd  in  six  volumes 
addressed  to  a  world  of  such  "  vulgar  fellows  "  as 
Thoreau  affirmed  his  fellow  men  to  be.  I  once 
had  a  glimpse  of  a  genuine  solitary  who  spent 
his  winters  one  hundred  and  fifty  miles  beyond 
all  human  communication,  and  there  dwelt  with 
his  rifle  as  his  only  confidant.  Compared  with 


^06  THOREAU 

this,  the  shanty  on  Walden  Pond  has  something 
the  air,  it  must  be  confessed,  of  the  Hermitage  of 
La  Chevrette.  I  do  not  believe  that  the  way 
to  a  true  cosmopolitanism  carries  one  into  the 
woods  or  the  society  of  musquashes.  Perhaps 
the  narrowest  provincialism  is  that  of  Self;  that 
of  Kleinwinkel  is  nothing  to  it.  The  natural 
man,  like  the  singing  birds,  comes  out  of  the  for 
est  as  inevitably  as  the  natural  bear  and  the  wild 
cat  stick  there.  To  seek  to  be  natural  implies  a 
consciousness  that  forbids  all  naturalness  forever. 
It  is  as  easy  —  and  no  easier  —  to  be  natural  in 
a  salon  as  in  a  swamp,  if  one  do  not  aim  at  it, 
for  what  we  call  unnaturalness  always  has  its 
spring  in  a  man's  thinking  too  much  about 
himself.  "  It  is  impossible/*  said  Turgot,  "  for 
a  vulgar  man  to  be  simple." 

I  look  upon  a  great  deal  of  the  modern  sen- 
timentalism  about  Nature  as  a  mark  of  disease. 
It  is  one  more  symptom  of  the  general  liver- 
complaint.  To  a  man  of  wholesome  constitution 
the  wilderness  is  well  enough  for  a  mood  or  a 
vacation,  but  not  for  a  habit  of  life.  Those  who 
have  most  loudly  advertised  their  passion  for 
seclusion  and  their  intimacy  with  Nature,  from 
Petrarch  down,  have  been  mostly  sentimental 
ists,  unreal  men,  misanthropes  on  the  spindle 
side,  solacing  an  uneasy  suspicion  of  themselves 
by  professing  contempt  for  their  kind.  They 
make  demands  on  the  world  in  advance  proper- 


THOREAU  307 

tioned  to  their  inward  measure  of  their  own 
merit,  and  are  angry  that  the  world  pays  only  by 
the  visible  measure  of  performance.  It  is  true 
of  Rousseau,  the  modern  founder  of  the  sect, 
true  of  Saint  Pierre,  his  intellectual  child,  and 
of  Chateaubriand,  his  grandchild,  the  inventor, 
we  might  almost  say,  of  the  primitive  forest,  and 
who  first  was  touched  by  the  solemn  falling  of 
a  tree  from  natural  decay  in  the  windless  silence 
of  the  woods.  It  is  a  very  shallow  view  that 
affirms  trees  and  rocks  to  be  healthy,  and  can 
not  see  that  men  in  communities  are  just  as  true 
to  the  laws  of  their  organization  and  destiny  ; 
that  can  tolerate  the  puffin  and  the  fox,  but  not 
the  fool  and  the  knave ;  that  would  shun  pol 
itics  because  of  its  demagogues,  and  snuff  up 
the  stench  of  the  obscene  fungus.  The  divine 
life  of  Nature  is  more  wonderful,  more  various, 
more  sublime  in  man  than  in  any  other  of  her 
works,  and  the  wisdom  that  is  gained  by  com 
merce  with  men,  as  Montaigne  and  Shakespeare 
gained  it,  or  with  one's  own  soul  among  men, 
as  Dante,  is  the  most  delightful,  as  it  is  the 
most  precious,  of  all.  In  outward  nature  it  is 
still  man  that  interests  us,  and  we  care  far  less 
for  the  things  seen  than  the  way  in  which  they 
are  seen  by  poetic  eyes  like  Wordsworth's  or 
Thoreau's,  and  the  reflections  they  cast  there. 
To  hear  the  to-do  that  is  often  made  over 


308  THOREAU 

the  simple  fact  that  a  man  sees  the  image  of 
himself  in  the  outward  world,  one  is  reminded 
of  a  savage  when  he  for  the  first  time  catches  a 
glimpse  of  himself  in  a  looking-glass.  "  Vener 
able  child  of  Nature/*  we  are  tempted  to  say, 
"  to  whose  science  in  the  invention  of  the  to 
bacco-pipe,  to  whose  art  in  the  tattooing  of  thine 
undegenerate  hide  not  yet  enslaved  by  tailors, 
we  are  slowly  striving  to  climb  back,  the  miracle 
thou  beholdest  is  sold  in  my  unhappy  country 
for  a  shilling!"  If  matters  go  on  as  they  have 
done,  and  everybody  must  needs  blab  of  all  the 
favors  that  have  been  done  him  by  roadside  and 
river-brink  and  woodland  walk,  as  if  to  kiss  and 
tell  were  no  longer  treachery,  it  will  be  a  positive 
refreshment  to  meet  a  man  who  is  as  superbly 
indifferent  to  Nature  as  she  is  to  him.  By  and 
by  we  shall  have  John  Smith,  of  No.  —12  —  iath 
Street,  advertising  that  he  is  not  the  J.  S.  who 
saw  a  cow-lily  on  Thursday  last,  as  he  never  saw 
one  in  his  life,  would  not  see  one  if  he  could, 
and  is  prepared  to  prove  an  alibi  on  the  day  in 
question. 

Solitary  communion  with  Nature  does  not 
seem  to  have  been  sanitary  or  sweetening  in  its 
influence  on  Thoreau's  character.  On  the  con 
trary,  his  letters  show  him  more  cynical  as  he  grew 
older.  While  he  studied  with  respectful  atten 
tion  the  minks  and  woodchucks,  his  neighbors, 


THOREAU  309 

he  looked  with  utter  contempt  on  the  august 
drama  of  destiny  of  which  his  country  was  the 
scene,  and  on  which  the  curtain  had  already 
risen.  He  was  converting  us  back  to  a  state  of 
nature  <c  so  eloquently,"  as  Voltaire  said  of  Rous 
seau,  4C  that  he  almost  persuaded  us  to  go  on 
all  fours,"  while  the  wiser  fates  were  making  it 
possible  for  us  to  walk  erect  for  the  first  time. 
Had  he  conversed  more  with  his  fellows,  his 
sympathies  would  have  widened  with  the  assur 
ance  that  his  peculiar  genius  had  more  apprecia 
tion,  and  his  writings  a  larger  circle  of  readers, 
or  at  least  a  warmer  one,  than  he  dreamed  of. 
We  have  the  highest  testimony  '  to  the  natural 
sweetness,  sincerity,  and  nobleness  of  his  tem 
per,  and  in  his  books  an  equally  irrefragable  one 
to  the  rare  quality  of  his  mind.  He  was  not  a 
strong  thinker,  but  a  sensitive  feeler.  Yet  his 
mind  strikes  us  as  cold  and  wintry  in  its  purity. 
A  light  snow  has  fallen  everywhere  in  which  he 
seems  to  come  on  the  track  of  the  shier  sensa 
tions  that  would  elsewhere  leave  no  trace.  We 
think  greater  compression  would  have  done 
more  for  his  fame.  A  feeling  of  sameness  comes 
over  us  as  we  read  so  much.  Trifles  are  recorded 
with  an  over-minute  punctuality  and  conscien 
tiousness  of  detail.  He  registers  the  state  of  his 
personal  thermometer  thirteen  times  a  day.  We 

1  Mr.  Emerson,  in  the  Biographical  Sketch  prefixed  to  the 
Excursions. 


3io  THORKAU 

cannot  help  thinking  sometimes  of  the  man 
who 

"Watches,  starves,  freezes,  and  sweats  — 
To  learn  but  catechisms  and  alphabets 
Of  unconcerning  things,  matters  of  fact," 

and  sometimes  of  the  saying  of  the  Persian  poet, 
that  "  when  the  owl  would  boast,  he  boasts  of 
catching  mice  at  the  edge  of  a  hole."  We  could 
readily  part  with  some  of  his  affectations.  It 
was  well  enough  for  Pythagoras  to  say,  once 
for  all,  "  When  I  was  Euphorbus  at  the  siege 
of  Troy  "  ;  not  so  well  for  Thoreau  to  travesty 
it  into  "  When  I  was  a  shepherd  on  the  plains 
of  Assyria."  A  naive  thing  said  over  again  is 
anything  but  naive.  But  with  every  exception, 
there  is  no  writing  comparable  with  Thoreau's 
in  kind,  that  is  comparable  with  it  in  degree 
where  it  is  best ;  where  it  disengages  itself,  that 
is,  from  the  tangled  roots  and  dead  leaves  of  a 
second-hand  Orientalism,  and  runs  limpid  and 
smooth  and  broadening  as  it  runs,  a  mirror  for 
whatever  is  grand  and  lovely  in  both  worlds. 

George  Sand  says  neatly,  that  "  Art  is  not 
a  study  of  positive  reality  "  (actuality  were  the 
fitter  word),  "  but  a  seeking  after  ideal  truth." 
It  would  be  doing  very  inadequate  justice  to 
Thoreau  if  we  left  it  to  be  inferred  that  this 
ideal  element  did  not  exist  in  him,  and  that  too 
in  larger  proportion,  if  less  obtrusive,  than  his 
nature-worship.  He  took  nature  as  the  moun- 


THOREAU  3'* 

tain-path  to  an  ideal  world.  If  the  path  wind 
a  good  deal,  if  he  record  too  faithfully  every  trip 
over  a  root,  if  he  botanize  somewhat  weari 
somely,  he  gives  us  now  and  then  superb  out 
looks  from  some  jutting  crag,  and  brings  us  out 
at  last  into  an  illimitable  ether,  where  the  breath 
ing  is  not  difficult  for  those  who  have  any  true 
touch  of  the  climbing  spirit.  His  shanty-life 
was  a  mere  impossibility,  so  far  as  his  own  con 
ception  of  it  goes,  as  an  entire  independency  of 
mankind.  The  tub  of  Diogenes  had  a  sounder 
bottom.  Thoreau's  experiment  actually  presup 
posed  all  that  complicated  civilization  which  it 
theoretically  abjured.  He  squatted  on  another 
man's  land  ;  he  borrows  an  axe ;  his  boards, 
his  nails,  his  bricks,  his  mortar,  his  books,  his 
lamp,  his  fish-hooks,  his  plough,  his  hoe,  all 
turn  state's  evidence  against  him  as  an  accom 
plice  in  the  sin  of  that  artificial  civilization  which 
rendered  it  possible  that  such  a  person  as  Henry 
D.  Thoreau  should  exist  at  all.  Magnis  tamen 
exddit  ausis.  His  aim  was  a  noble  and  a  useful 
one,  in  the  direction  of  "  plain  living  and  high 
thinking."  It  was  a  practical  sermon  on  Em 
erson's  text  that  "things  are  in  the  saddle  and 
ride  mankind,"an  attempt  to  solve  Carlyle's  pro 
blem  (condensed  from  Johnson)  of  "  lessening 
your  denominator."  His  whole  life  was  a  rebuke 
of  the  waste  and  aimlessness  of  our  American 
luxury,  which  is  an  abject  enslavement  to  tawdry 


3,2  THOREAU 

upholstery.  He  had  "  fine  translunary  things" 
in  him.  His  better  style  as  a  writer  is  in  keep 
ing  with  the  simplicity  and  purity  of  his  life. 
We  have  said  that  his  range  was  narrow,  but  to 
be  a  master  is  to  be  a  master.  He  had  caught 
his  English  at  its  living  source,  among  the  poets 
and  prose-writers  of  its  best  days  ;  his  literature 
was  extensive  and  recondite  ;  his  quotations  are 
always  nuggets  of  the  purest  ore  :  there  are  sen 
tences  of  his  as  perfect  as  anything  in  the  lan 
guage,  and  thoughts  as  clearly  crystallized  ;  his 
metaphors  and  images  are  always  fresh  from  the 
soil ;  he  had  watched  Nature  like  a  detective 
who  is  to  go  upon  the  stand  ;  as  we  read  him, 
it  seems  as  if  all-out-of-doors  had  kept  a  diary 
and  become  its  own  Montaigne  ;  we  look  at  the 
landscape  as  in  a  Claude  Lorraine  glass ;  com 
pared  with  his,  all  other  books  of  similar  aim, 
even  White's  "  Selborne,"  seem  dry  as  a  country 
clergyman's  meteorological  journal  in  an  old 
almanac.  He  belongs  with  Donne  and  Browne 
and  Novalis  ;  if  not  with  the  originally  creative 
men,  with  the  scarcely  smaller  class  who  are 
peculiar,  and  whose  leaves  shed  their  invisible 
thought-seed  like  ferns. 


RIVERSIDE  ESSAYS 

Edited  by  ADA  L.  F.  SNELL 

Associate  Professor  of English ,  Mount  Hoi  yoke  College 

The  purpose  of  the  Riverside  Essays  is  to  present  to  stu 
dents  of  English  composition  essays  by  modern  authors  which 
deal  in  a  fresh  way  with  such  subjects  as  politics,  science,  lit 
erature,  and  nature.  The  close  study  of  vigorous  and  artistic 
writing  is  generally  acknowledged  to  be  the  best  method  of 
gaining  a  mastery  of  the  technique  of  composition. 

In  the  Riverside  Essays  the  material  consists  of  essays 
which,  with  few  exceptions,  have  been  printed  entire.  Other 
advantages  of  the  Riverside  Essays  for  both  instructor  and 
student  lie  in  the  fact  that  the  material  is  presented  in  sepa 
rate  volumes,  each  of  which  is  devoted  to  a  single  author  and 
contains  two  or  more  representative  essays. 

Finally,  the  series  has  none  of  the  earmarks  of  the  ordinary 
textbook  which  the  student  passes  on,  marked  and  battered, 
to  tne  next  college  generation.  The  books  are  attractively 
printed,  and  bound,  in  the  Library  Binding  of  The  Riverside 
Literature  Series.  The  student  will  therefore  be  glad  to  keep 
these  books  for  his  own  library. 

PROMOTING  GOOD  CITIZENSHIP 

By  JAMKS  BRYCE.   With  an  Introduction.    Riverside  Literature  Series, 
No.  227,  Library  Binding.     40  cents,  net.     Postpaid. 

STUDIES  IN  NATURE  AND  LITERATURE 

By  JOHN  BURROUGHS.     Riverside  Literature  Series,  No.  226,  Library 
Binding.     40  cents,  net.     Postpaid. 

UNIVERSITY  SUBJECTS 

By  JOHN    HENPY    NEWMAN.     Rirerside  Literature  Series,  No.   225. 
Library  Binding.     40  cents,  net.     Postpaid. 

'HE  AMERICAN  MIND  AND  AMERICAN  IDEALISM 
By  Buss  PERRY.  With  an  Introduction.  Riverside  Literature  Series 
No.  224.  Library  Binding.  40  cents,  net.  Postpaid. 


HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 

BOSTON     NEW  YORK    CHICAGO 


ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

A  Short   History  of  England's   Literature.      By   EVA 

MARCH  TAPPAN.  $  .9/0 

A  Student's  History  of  English  Literature.  By  WIL 
LIAM  EDWARD  SIMONDS.  1.25 

Lives  of  Great  English  Writers.  From  Chaucer  to 
Browning.  By  W.  S.  HINCHMAN  and  FRANCIS  B.  GUM- 
MERE,  i. 5^ 

Masterpieces  of  British  Literature.  Edited  by  HORACE 
E.  SCUDDER.  With  biographical  sketches,  portraits,  and 
explanatory  notes.  1. 00 

A  Victorian  Anthology.     Edited  by  EDMUND  CLARENCE 

STEDMAN.     Student's  Edition.  2.00 


AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

A  Short  History  of  England's  and  America's  Literature. 

By  EVA  MARCH  TAPPAN.  1.20 

A  Short  History  of  America's  Literature.  WTith  Selec 
tions  from  Colonial  and  Revolutionary  writers.  By  EVA 
MARCH  TAPPAN.  .85 

A  Primer  of  American  Literature.  By  CHARLES  F.  RICH 
ARDSON.  .50 

A  History  of  American  Literature.  By  WILLIAM  E.  SI 
MONDS.  x.io 

Masterpieces  of  American  Literature.  Edited  by  HORACE 
E.  SCUDDER.  With  biographical  sketches,  portraits,  and 
explanatory  notes.  1. 00 

An  American  Anthology.     Edited  by  EDMUND  CLARENCE 

STEDMAN.     Student's  Edition.  2.2f 

The  Chief  American  Poets.  Edited  by  CURTIS  HIDDEN 
PAGE.  2.oc 

The  Chief  American  Prose  Writers.     Edited  by  NORMAN 

FOERSTER.  2.00 

Prices  are  net^  postpaid 


HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 

BOSTON    NEW  YORK    CHICAGO 

1415 


LITERATURE  SELECTIONS 

Modern  English  Prose  and  Poetry  for  Secondary 
Schools.  Edited  by  MARGARET  A  SUM  UN.  $  ,81 

Prose  Literature  for  Secondary  Schools.  With  some 
suggestions  for  correlation  with  composition.  Edited 
by  MARGARET  ASHMUN.  \Vith  an  introduction  by  Wiv 
LARD  G.  BLEYER.  .80 

The  High  School  Prize  Speaker.  Edited  by  WILLIAM  L. 
SNOW  .90 

American  and  English  Classics  for  Grammar  Grades.  5' 

Selections   from   the    Riverside    Literature    Series   for 

Fifth  Grade  Reading.  .40 

Selections   from   the   Riverside   Literature   Series  for 

Sixth  Grade  Reading.  .40 

Selections  from  the  Riverside  Literature  Series  for 
Seventh  Grade  Reading.  .^c 

Selections  from  the  Riverside  Literature  Series  for 
Eighth  Grade  Reading.  ,40 

American  Classics.     (Poems  and  Prose.)  .75 

American  Poems.     Edited  by  HORACE  E.  SCUDDER.  X.oi» 

American  Prose.     Edited  by  HORACE  E.  SCUDDER  I.OO 

Literary  Masterpieces.  .80 

Masterpieces  of  American  Literature.  Edited  by  HOR 
ACE  E.  SCUDDER.  i.oo 

Masterpieces  of  British  Literature.  Edited  by  HORACE 
E.  SCUDDER.  I.oc 

Masterpieces  of  Greek  Literature.  (Translations.)  Su 
pervising  editor,  JOHN  HENRY  WRIGHT.  1.50 

Masterpieces  of  Latin  Literature.  (Translations.)  Ed 
ited  by  G.  J.  LAINO.  i.y 

Prices  are  net,  postpaid. 


HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 

BOSTON    NEW  YORK    CHICAGO 


ENGLISH  FOR  COLLEGE  COURSES 

Talks  on  Writing  English 

By  ARLO  BATES.    First  Series,  $1.30.     Second  Series,  #1.30. 
A  Handbook  of  Oral  Reading 

By  LEE  EMERSON  BASSETT,  Associate  Professor  of  English,  Leland  Stanford 

Junior  University.     $>i.6o. 

Especial  emphasis  is  placed  on  the  relation  of  thought  and  speech, 
technical  vocal  exercises  being  subordinated  to  a  study  of  the  prin 
ciples  underlying  the  expression  of  ideas.  Illustrative  selections  of 
both  poetry  and  prose  are  freely  employed. 

Argumentation  and  Debating 

By  WILLIAM  T.  FOSTER,  President  of  Reed  College,  Portland,  Oregon.  $1.25. 

The  point  of  view  throughout  is  that  of  the  student  rather  than 
that  of  the  teacher;  and  the  proportion  of  practical  material  to 
theoretical  is  therefore  large. 

The  Rhetorical  Principles  of  Narration 

By  CARROLL  LEWIS  MAXCY,  M.A.,  Morris  Professor  of  Rhetoric  in  Williams 

College.    £1.35. 

A  clear  and  thorough  analysis  of  the  three  elements  of  narrative 
writing,  viz.:  setting,  character,  and  plot.  Each  of  these  elements 
is  discussed  from  the  standards  of  unity,  coherence,  and  emphasis. 

Representative  Narratives 

Edited  by  CARROLL  LEWIS  MAXCY,  M.A.    $1.50. 

This  compilation  contains  twenty-two  complete  narrative  selec 
tions  by  well-known  writers.  It  presents  unified  specimens  of 
various  types  of  narrative  composition. 

The  Study  and  Practice  of  Writing  English 

By  GERHARD  R.  LOMER,  Ph.D.,  Instructor  in  English,  School  of  Journalism, 
Columbia  University,  and  MARGARET  ASHMUN,  Formerly  Instructor  in 
English,  University  of  Wisconsin.  $1.15. 

A  textbook  in  the  technique  of  writing  English,  designed  for  use 
in  college  Freshman  courses. 

Newspaper  Writing  and  Editing 

By  WILLARD  G.  BLEYER,  Professor  of  Journalism  in  the  University  of  Wis 
consin.  $1.65. 

This  fully  meets  the  requirements  of  Courses  in  Journalism  as 
given  in  our  colleges  and  universities,  and  at  the  same  time  appeals 
to  practical  newspaper  men  as  a  most  interesting  and  suggestive 
treatment  of  the  subject. 

Types  of  News  Writing 

By  WILLARD  G.  BLEYER.    #1.50. 

Over  two  hundred  typical  stories  taken  from  representative 
American  newspapers  are  here  presented  in  a  form  convenient  for 
college  classes  in  journalism.  The  stories  are  grouped  according  to 
subject  matter  and  treatment,  each  group  being  preceded  by  a  brief 
discussion  of  methods  of  preparing  stories  of  that  particular  type. 

HOUGHTON   MIFFLIN  COMPANY 

BOSTON    NEW  YORK    CHICAGO 


RIVERSIDE   LITERATURE   SERIES 
LIBRARY   BINDING 


CHAUCER'S  THE  PROLOGUE,  THE  KNIGHT'S  TALE,  AND  THE  NUN'S 
PRIEST'S  TALE.     Edited  by  F.  J.  MATHER,  Jr.    55  cents,  net.     Postpaid, 

MALORY'S  THE  BOOK  OF  MERLIN  AND  THE  BOOK  OF  SIR  BALIN. 
Edited  by  C.  G.  CHILD      40  cents,  net.  Postpaid. 

RALPH  ROISTER  DOISTER.     Kdited  by  C.  G.  CHILD.  55  cents,  net.  Postpaid. 

THE  SECOND  SHEPHERDS'  PLAY,  EVERYMAN,  AND  OTHER  EARLY 
PLAYS.     Edited  by  C   G.  CHILD.    55  cents  net.    Postpaid. 

SPENSER'S  FAERIE    QUEENE.     BOOK  I.    Edited  by  M.  H.  SHACKFOKD. 
55  cents,  net.     Postpaid. 

ESSAYS  OF  FRANCIS  BACON.     Edited  by  C.  S.  NORTHUP.   55  cents,  net. 
Postpaid. 

MILTON'S  OF  EDUCATION,  AREOPAGITICA,  THE  COMMONWEALTH. 
Edited  by  L.  E.  LOCKWOOD.  65  cents,  net.    Postpaid. 

ENGLISH  AND   SCOTTISH   BALLADS.      Edited  under  the  supervision  of  W. 
A.  NKILSON.     55  cents,  net.     Postpaid. 

GOLDSMITH'S    THE    GOOD-NATURED    MAN,    AND    SHE    STOOPS   TO 
CONQUER.     Edited  by  T.  H    DICKINSON.    55  cents,  net.     Postpaid 

SELECTED   POEMS   BY   PERCY  BYSSHE   SHELLEY.       Edited  by  G.   H. 
CLARKE.    65  cents,  net.    Postpaid. 

CARLYLE'S  HEROES,  HERO-WORSHIP,  AND  THE  HEROIC  IN  HISTORY. 
Edited  by  J.  C.  ADAMS.     65  cents,  net.     Postpaid. 

SELECTIONS  FROM  THE  WORKS  OF  JOHN  RUSKIN.     Edited  by  C.   B. 
TINKER.     65  cents,  net.     Postpaid. 

HUXLEY'S  AUTOBIOGRAPHY,   AND  SELECTED  ESSAYS.    Edited  by  A. 
L.  F.  SNELL.     55  cents,  net.     Postpaid. 

SELECTIONS  FROM    THE    PROSE  WORKS    OF    MATTHEW  ARNOLD. 
Edited  by  W.  S.  JOHNSON.     65  cents,  net.     Postpaid. 

SELECTED  LITERARY    ESSAYS    FROM    JAMES  RUSSELL    LOWELL. 
Edited  by  W.  D.  Howe  and  N.  FOERSTER.     65  cents,  ntt.     Postpaid. 

COLLEGE  LIFE.     By  LB  B.  R.  BRIGGS.     40  cents,  net.     Postpaid. 

TO   COLLEGE   GIRLS.     By  Ls  B.  R.  BRIGGS.    40  cents,  net.     Postpaid. 

THE  AMERICAN  MIND  AND   AMERICAN  IDEALISM.      By  BLISS  PERRY 
40  cents,  net.     Postpaid. 

STUDIES   IN    NATURE  AND    LITERATURE.     By  JOHN  BURROUGHS.     40 
cents,  net.     Postpaid. 

UNIVERSITY  SUBJECTS.    By  JOHN  HENRY  NEWMAN.    40  cents,  net.     Post 
paid. 

PROMOTING  GOOD  CITIZENSHIP.    By  JAMBS  BRYCB.    40  cents,  net.    Post 
paid. 

THE  TRAINING  FOR  AN  EFFECTIVE  LIFE.    By  CHARLES  W.  ELIOT.   40 
cents,  net.     Postpaid. 

ENGLISH  SONNETS.    Selected  by  LAURA  E   LOCKWOOD.  40  cents,  net.    Post 
paid. 

SHAKESPEARE  QUESTIONS.    By  ODBLL  SHBPARD    55  cents,  net.   Postpaid. 

BOSWELL'S  LIFE  OF  JOHNSON.    Edited  by  GERARD  E.  JENSEN.  Inprtu. 

SHERIDAN'S  THE  SCHOOL  FOR  SCANDAL.     Edited  by  H.  H.  WEBSTER. 
/*  prest. 

Other  volumes  in  preparation. 

1405 


14  DAY  USE 

RETURN  TO  DESK  FROM  WHICH  BORROWED 

LOAN  DEPT. 

This  book  is  due  on  the  last  date  stamped  below,  or 

on  the  date  to  which  renewed. 
Renewed  books  are  subject  to  immediate  recalL^r 


W»OT 

ssn  AJW 

IN  STACKS 

JAN  •>    1968 

M4P  1  ^L  • 

RECT/^D 

M. 

19'64-' 

3May'64RW 

P~C'D  LD 

~L                  ^A     -aft       PiVl 

...L,;.,-*    .-,     . 

62 

RHTOLD   DUG  22 

)'72-llPM  R  0 

General  Library 

University  of  California 

Berkeley 

DEC   7861 


50  WJ, 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 

'''.  ""'•: 


